2.5
Overstaying
ByPublisher Description
Winner of the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force.
“I don't see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,” writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave.
When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.
“I don't see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,” writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave.
When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities18 Reviews
2.5
Ruby Spillman
Created 22 days agoShare
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Madison
Created 23 days agoShare
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“Overstaying is an absurdist story of a complex relationship between an unnamed narrator and a strange visitor she invites to stay at her house. A house that she loosely inherited from her parents after they abandoned her, according to the narrator’s version of events, and is waiting idly before her siblings come along to claim the house for themselves. The narrator would’ve left long ago, too, but instead, she decides to stay in her small, undisclosed town out of spite.
Once the visitor moves in, he becomes an ever-present nuisance and safekeeping, like a drug or parasite. Written in short fragments, the narrator jumps back and forth between her interactions with the visitor, who is neither human nor a pet — it’s easier to imagine him as the dog, colonial man hybrid on the cover. Meanwhile, the narrator is a contradictory mess who has issues with control, self-sabotage, self-isolation, and possessiveness. Yet her worst traits are her most relatable.
The whole experience is bizarre, enigmatic, like a dream.
Pick this one up if you gravitate toward unconventional, plotless books that leave you with more questions than answers.”grace audrey
Created 27 days agoShare
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“🤷🏻♀️”
SleepyBirdO.O🌽✒️
Created 29 days agoShare
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“This was certainly something. Imagine a stream of consciousness but the narrator keeps falling asleep and has no idea when they’re actually awake, or who they’re talking to, or when they started talking, or if they’re even talking in the first place.. and on and on and on.
After this I believe I’d read absolutely anything written by Ariane Koch.”
S. Corine
Created about 1 month agoShare
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“No clue what the book was about, but it was a great book nonetheless.”
About Ariane Koch
Ariane Koch was born in Basel and studied fine arts and interdisciplinarity. She writes—often in collaboration—theatre and performance texts, radio plays and prose. Her texts have won numerous awards and have been performed in places like Basel, Berlin, Cairo, Istanbul, and Moscow. Overstaying is her debut novel.
Damion Searls has translated thirty books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, including the novels of Jon Fosse, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Damion Searls has translated thirty books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, including the novels of Jon Fosse, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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