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A new novel of artful understatement about mortality, estrangement, and the absurdity of life from the acclaimed author of Unformed Landscape and In Strange Gardens
On a day like any other, Andreas changes his life. When a routine doctor’s visit leads to an unexpected prognosis, a great yearning takes hold of him—but who can tell if it is homesickness or wanderlust? Andreas leaves everything behind, sells his Paris apartment; cuts off all social ties; quits his teaching job; and waves goodbye to his days spent idly sitting in cafes—to look for a woman he once loved, half a lifetime ago. The monotony of days has been keeping him in check; now he hopes for a miracle and for a new beginning.
Andreas’ travels lead him back to the province of his youth, back to his hometown in Switzerland where he returns to familiar streets, where his brother still lives in their childhood home, and where Fabienne, a woman he was obsessed with in his youth, visits the same lake they once swam in together. Andreas, still consumed with longing for his lost love and blinded by the uncertainty of his future, is tormented by the question of what might have been if things had happened differently.
Peter Stamm has been praised as a “stylistic ascetic” and his prose as “distinguished by lapidary expression, telegraphic terseness, and finely tuned sensitivity” (Bookforum). In On a Day Like This, Stamm’s unobtrusive observational style allows us to journey with our antihero through his crises of banality, of living in his empty world, and the realization that life is finite—that one must live it, as long as that is possible.
Praise for Unformed Landscape:
“Sensitive and unnerving. . . . An uncommonly intimate work, one that will remind the reader of his or her own lived experience with a greater intensity than many of the books that are published right here at home.” —The New Republic Online
“If Albert Camus had lived in an age when people in remote Norwegian fishing villages had e-mail, he might have written a novel like this.”—The New Yorker
“Unformed Landscape has a refreshing purity, a lack of delusion, a lack of hype.”—Los Angeles Times
On a day like any other, Andreas changes his life. When a routine doctor’s visit leads to an unexpected prognosis, a great yearning takes hold of him—but who can tell if it is homesickness or wanderlust? Andreas leaves everything behind, sells his Paris apartment; cuts off all social ties; quits his teaching job; and waves goodbye to his days spent idly sitting in cafes—to look for a woman he once loved, half a lifetime ago. The monotony of days has been keeping him in check; now he hopes for a miracle and for a new beginning.
Andreas’ travels lead him back to the province of his youth, back to his hometown in Switzerland where he returns to familiar streets, where his brother still lives in their childhood home, and where Fabienne, a woman he was obsessed with in his youth, visits the same lake they once swam in together. Andreas, still consumed with longing for his lost love and blinded by the uncertainty of his future, is tormented by the question of what might have been if things had happened differently.
Peter Stamm has been praised as a “stylistic ascetic” and his prose as “distinguished by lapidary expression, telegraphic terseness, and finely tuned sensitivity” (Bookforum). In On a Day Like This, Stamm’s unobtrusive observational style allows us to journey with our antihero through his crises of banality, of living in his empty world, and the realization that life is finite—that one must live it, as long as that is possible.
Praise for Unformed Landscape:
“Sensitive and unnerving. . . . An uncommonly intimate work, one that will remind the reader of his or her own lived experience with a greater intensity than many of the books that are published right here at home.” —The New Republic Online
“If Albert Camus had lived in an age when people in remote Norwegian fishing villages had e-mail, he might have written a novel like this.”—The New Yorker
“Unformed Landscape has a refreshing purity, a lack of delusion, a lack of hype.”—Los Angeles Times
6 Reviews
3.5
Aiden
Created 5 months agoShare
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Lily
Created almost 2 years agoShare
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“Andreas lives on his own in Paris, after following his young love from Switzerland. He has now settled into a routine of bachelor life, teaching, then coming home, and on specific days seeing his lovers. But the potential of a cancer diagnosis shakes him to leave what he describes as an emptiness of a life, and revisit his his former love interest, Fabienne, back in their hometown.
As opposed to Peter Stamm's other books, this narrative is told in third person, and it shows in a limited level of empathy that you can exercise as a reader. While we do get insight into Andreas' mind, his feelings for Fabienne, his reluctance to embark onto any other long-term relationship, and changing his ways instantly after encountering his doctor, there are many things that are brushed upon, in particular the whys. The story is more plot-driven, more decisions for us to wonder about than to properly understand. This makes Andreas appear capricious, at times undecided, and at times deliberately hurting others without any apparent reason except impatience in dealing with a situation thoroughly.
It's this disconnection to the protagonist that disappointed me. I wished there was more to the story. There are certainly things that I learned, that it made me think about, but I wish it also gave me more of a perspective as to someone would have handled it. In particular, the idea of routine making life empty is something I reflect on constantly. Going to work, coming home, doing the same things, all in a loop. How do you embed a sense of newness, of adventure in your life? How do you keep growing, pushing, challenging yourself when your circumstances are so constant? And how do you find the energy to keep putting in the effort to do so, when everything encourages complacency? I'd have liked more insight into the protagonist's thought process.
Nevertheless, it was an engaging book, but something was missing, it read very distanced.”
CK Sparkles
Created over 6 years agoShare
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“"Everything would be much easier if you could see yourself as a victim, he thought, a victim of your childhood, of fate, of the people you had grown up among, and finally too, as. victim of illness. But in order to feel himself a victim, he had to believe in the possibility of another, better life. Andreas believed in nothing but chance. He loved the curious coincidences and repetitions that life threw up, against all logic. He loved the surprising patterns that came about in the sky, or on a body of water or in the shade of a tree, the continual tiny adjustments in the same overall context.. Nadia called in nihilism; his own word for it was modesty."
This is exactly how this whole book goes - you think it's going to be a pitiful sad story filled with regret about a man who has never married or had a family, never really been in a committed relationship or even had a deep friend, facing a possible fatal diagnosis - and yet, and yet, it's just not that sad and pitiful. It always turns - Andreas seems to find enough joy, enough meaning, even as he contemplates a world in which no one will miss him in or even remember him in twenty years. He is not terribly likeable - not particularly nice to the women he has "relations" with. . but at some level endearingly honest and vulnerable.
I kept wanting to not like Andreas, or to find the book boring, but it just totally hooked me in. Once again I am a total sucker for a well developed sense of place, thoughtful language, and a well developed, reflective character. Stramm delivers all of this.”
Clarissa
Created about 10 years agoShare
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About Peter Stamm
Peter Stamm is the author of the novels The Sweet Indifference of the World, To the Back of Beyond, All Days Are Night, Seven Years, On a Day Like This, Unformed Landscape, and Agnes, and the short-story collections We’re Flying and In Strange Gardens and Other Stories. His award-winning books have been translated into more than forty languages. For his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction, he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. He lives in Switzerland.
Michael Hofmann has translated Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Patrick S, Herta Mueller, and Franz Kafka. He won the Translators' Association's Schlegel-Tieck Prize twice in 1988 for his adaptation of The Double Bass by Patrick S (1987), and in 1993 for his rendering of Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome (1992). In 1999 he won the PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize for The String of Pearls. His translation of his father's novel The Film Explainer, by Gert Hofmann, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995. He has written and translated more than 35 books, winning eight awards for his translations and his poetry.
Michael Hofmann has translated Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Patrick S, Herta Mueller, and Franz Kafka. He won the Translators' Association's Schlegel-Tieck Prize twice in 1988 for his adaptation of The Double Bass by Patrick S (1987), and in 1993 for his rendering of Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome (1992). In 1999 he won the PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize for The String of Pearls. His translation of his father's novel The Film Explainer, by Gert Hofmann, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995. He has written and translated more than 35 books, winning eight awards for his translations and his poetry.
Other books by Peter Stamm
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