How fragile is our sense of reality?

 Peter Stamm’s new collection of short stories, translated by Michael Hofmann, are interesting if only for the diversity of the main characters sketched in each:

—A middle-aged writer, snowed in at an artists’ residency in Vermont, recalls another Christmas and a woman he met thirty years earlier. (“Marcia from Vermont”)

—A young woman models for a sculptor but, disturbed by the finished product, she follows her double to the collector who buys it. (“Sabrina, 2019”)

—A teenager decides to rob a bank wearing a squirrel mask. (“Nahtigal)

—A woman, annoyed that her husband keeps taking work calls during their vacation, abandons him at a highway rest stop. (“First Snow”)

—A man, surreptitiously reading his wife’s email, begins to suspect she is having an affair. (“Dietrich’s Knee”)

Unfortunately, while these snippets indicate Stamm’s range, they say nothing about his writing, which is spare, clear as an Alpine lake, or the effect at finishing each story. It is often as if in each story we are introduced to the known world populated by perfectly ordinary people doing ordinary things—or at least nothing bizarre or unbelievable —when abruptly we are no longer in quotidian reality. It’s an impressive trick, and I’d like to know how he does it.

Stamm, born in 1963, grew up in Wenfelden, Switzerland, the son of an accountant. After completing school, he spent three years as an apprentice accountant and then five as an accountant. He went back to school at the University of Zurich taking courses in English studies, business informatics, psychology, and psychopathology. During this time, he also worked as an intern at a psychiatric clinic.

After living for a time in New York, Paris, and Scandinavia he settled down in 1990 as a writer and freelance journalist in Zurich where he has written prose, radio dramas, and plays. Since 1997 he has belonged to the editorial staff of the quarterly literary magazine Entwürfe für Literatur (Drafts for Literature), and since 2003 he’s been a member of the group Autorinnen und Autoren der Schweiz (Authors of Switzerland). He has been widely translated; Michael Hofmann has fluently translated nine of his novels into English.

In a 2012 New Yorker interview, Stamm said, “It has always been my goal to make literature out of ordinary people’s lives. I don’t like the extremes; I don’t think that they teach us much about ourselves. And very often extreme or willfully original stories are just trying to make up for a lack of empathy on the part of the author.”

In each of these stories, the characters face a decision that will alter the course of their lives. He explores the spaces between reality and daydreams, between the choices his characters make, and the infinite possibilities that are lost with every decision. 

It’s Getting Dark plays with memory and time, even death, to indicate how fragile our reality really is, and how susceptible it is to tricks of the heart and mind.

If we can't trust our memories, then what?

I had to read Peter Stamm's slim new novel The Sweet Indifference of the World twice to feel confident enough write about it cogently.

It starts straightforwardly enough: After an introductory chapter in which the narrator describes visits from a woman who may—or may not—be an old girlfriend (and may—or may not—be real), he tells us that he has arranged a meeting with a Magdalena (Lena) in Stockholm's Skogskyrkogården cemetery. Lena is in her late twenties; he is at least fifty, although in the first chapter he seems much older: "My wheezing alarms me, it's an old man's voice, a voice that's just as alien to me as the frail body that imprisons me . .  . In my haste I've forgotten my cane, and I'm torn between my fear of slipping on the ice and falling and my other fear of losing Magdalena from view . . ." But Lena he's meeting in Stockholm is not the one who visits him in chapter one (I don't think); it's another Magdalena.

In Stockholm the narrator introduces himself to Lena as Christopher. Lena tells him that coincidentally her boyfriend's name is Chris, and he would like to be a writer. Both Lena and Magdalena are actresses. In the cemetery Christopher tells Lena that he used to be a writer; he wrote a novel about a disillusioned author: "The book was a love story, it was supposed to be a portrait of my girlfriend, but while I was writing it, we broke up, and so it turned into an account of our breakup and the impossibility of love. For the first time in my writing, I had the feeling I was creating a living world. At the same time, I could feel reality slipping through my fingers, daily life was getting boring and shallow to me."

So we have Christopher and Magdalena (Christ and Mary Magdalen?) interacting the past and Chris and Lena interacting in the present as the narrator tells his story. His novel's sales had provided a respectable income but more importantly justified the narrator's efforts to write it. He never admitting at readings or in interviews how much of the story was about himself. Asked about that, "I dismissed the idea, and insisted on the separation between author and narrator."

Which of course immediately makes the reader wonder how much of The Sweet Indifference of the World is about Peter Stamm. According to Wikipedia, Stamm books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 for his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction. Stamm grew up in Weinfelden in the canton of Thurgau, the son of an accountant. He spent three years as an apprentice accountant and then five as an accountant. He then went to the University of Zurich, taking courses in English studies, business informatics, psychology, and psychopathology while he also worked as an intern at a psychiatric clinic. After living for a time in New York, Paris, and Scandinavia he settled down as a writer and freelance journalist in Zurich in 1990. He's written prose, radio drama, and plays. I was impressed by his last novel To the Back of Beyond, which I reviewed in 2017. He's known for his cool and sparse writing style, all of which are represented in The Sweet Indifference of the World.

Which grows more murky. At the end of Chapter Three, the narrator is late returning to the hotel in the Swiss village in which he grew up. For a time he'd been the hotel's night porter himself. Because it's late he has to wait to be admitted. "Finally, I heard a door bang, and shortly afterwards saw movement in the corridor, the inner glass door opened, and a young man approached me. While he fiddled around with the lock, I saw his face next to the reflection of my own, but not until he held the door open for me did I realize that he was me."

When Lena in Stockholm questions the narrator, he says that looking at the night porter was like looking into a mirror. "Amazingly, he seemed to have no sense of the resemblance, of the identity. He gave me a perfectly ordinary greeting, and walked ahead of me to the reception desk, handed me my key, and said good night." The narrator sees his doppelgänger—who says his name is Chris—at least twice more over the years. Indeed, several years after the hotel meeting they visit the beach together in Barcelona where Christopher has been teaching German.

Stamm is playing with memory, reader expectations, and ideas about reality. In Barcelona doppelgänger Chris searches for Christopher's novel on his cell phone; it does not exist. Chris does a Google search for Magdalena's name and "actor." There is one entry on a drama school home page; nothing to confirm Christopher's memory of  Magdalena's successful career in a variety of productions. "Suddenly I felt an indescribable fury . . . There he was, imagining a quick Internet search was enough to rub out the whole of my life, as if only what was online existed."

As I said at the beginning, this is a slim novel, almost a novella (and when does a novella cross the line and become a novel? that's the kind of question reading Stamm provokes). It's not a difficult read; as Wikipedia says and as my quotations indicate the prose is cool and sparse  (the Michael Hofmann translation is impeccable). It evokes a profound question: If we can't trust our memories, what can we trust? Perhaps, as the publisher's promotional material says, Stamm is suggesting that our stories are not only already planned out, but wholly unoriginal as well, endlessly repeating themselves through different people. The Sweet Indifference of the World is a novel to read more than once for the pleasure it offers and the thought it stimulates.

What happens if you just walk away from your life?

Am I the only husband who has thought once or twice about walking away from his wife and children? Just taking off and leaving one life behind for an entirely unplanned, unstructured, utterly free new life? That's what Thomas (no last name), a middle-aged, middle-class Swiss accountant does one evening.

He and his wife Astrid have just returned from a vacation in Spain to their small town in Switzerland. They are sharing an evening glass of wine in their garden when a squabble between the children draws Astrid into the house. After she settles Konrad and Ella, rather than return to the garden she goes to bed exhausted after the drive home. And Thomas walks away, leaving his wine unfinished.

So begins Peter Stamm's short novel To the Back of Beyond, his fifth. It is of a piece of his earlier work. The Financial Times wrote of an earlier novel, "Stamm eschews middlebrow concerns of plot and resolution . . . his narrative is centered on the ruptures in his main characters' lives and their consequences . . ." Stamm never gives the reader a neat, pat explanation why Thomas leaves. We can infer possible reasons from what he does, but different readers will make different inferences.

Astrid's first reaction is to lie to the children, lie to Thomas's secretary. When it seems he won't turn up after a day or two, she goes to the police.

The book has no chapters as such, but the narrative switches point of view as first we follow Thomas's peregrination, then Astrid's with almost no access to their thoughts. "Thomas imagined Astrid making two separate piles of clean and dirty clothes . . ." Is about as close as we get to his inner life.

Rather, we watch them do things and move through the landscape, often with precise and lovely descriptions smoothly translated by Michael Hoffmann: "Ahead of him grew his shadow as cast by the streetlamp behind, then it merged into the life of the one following, which cast a fresh shadow behind him, which in turn grew shorter, overtook him, and hurried ahead of him, growing all the while, a sort of ghostly relay of specters accompanying him out of the neighborhood, across the circular road, and into the business district that sprawled away from the village out into the flat land."

If "plot" is what happens to characters in a story, To the Back of Beyond clearly has a plot (pace Financial Times). Astrid does try to find Thomas. The police are as helpful as they can be, although as one sympathetic officer tells her, "An adult has the right to disappear." (Some readers, I know, will be put off by the novel's lack of quotation marks; others like myself will have no trouble following the dialogue.)

Among the novel's strengths are the questions it provokes in the reader: Is the life we're living the one we want? What motivates us to obey our routines? Can one person ever truly know another? In a sense the questions are unanswerable, but Stamm's To the Back of Beyond makes a fascinating stab at addressing them, at least for this very ordinary, but extraordinary, Swiss couple.