Angst and Alienation: Peter Stamm
Known for its spectacular scenery, peerless watchmaking, delicious chocolate, as well as its reputed political neutrality, Switzerland is also the home of renowned writers, artists, and philosophers, many of whom have made significant cultural contributions over the centuries, including: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacob Burckhardt, Ferdinand de Saussure, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Tinguely, Carl Jung, Robert Walser, Fleur Jaeggy, and Jean-Luc Godard, to name but a few.
Born in Weinfelden, Switzerland, in 1963, Peter Stamm ranks today as one of his homeland’s leading contemporary authors of fiction. He was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In the English-speaking world, Stamm is best known for his novels, all of which have been translated from German by Michael Hofmann, including: Agnes (1998), Unformed Landscape (2001), On a Day Like This (2006), Seven Years (2009), All Days Are Night (2013), and To the Back of Beyond (2016), The Sweet Indifference of the World (2018).
Stamm’s writing stands out for being both simultaneously lean and gorgeous. As Claire Messud noted in Harper’s Stamm’s “precise, dry prose builds suspense in its very insistence on the quotidian, creates narratives simultaneously ordinary and strange, even uncanny.”
Sexual and romantic entanglements fascinate Stamm and are frequently the subjects of his novels and stories because, as he says: “Romantic relationships are probably the place where most tragedies happen in our modern, saturated lives. It’s where we are happy and sad, aroused and confused.”
In what follows I examine some of the tragedies that happen in several of his better-known novels.
I should note, however, that Stamm is also a brilliant short story writer, and has published three collections: Strange Gardens and Other Stories (2006), We’re Flying (2012), and It’s Getting Dark: Stories (2021); and, he also writes plays and radio dramas.
In the chorus of Ray LaMontagne’s haunting love song “Empty,” he sings:
“Will I always feel this way?
So empty, so estranged?”
These questions weigh heavily in the minds of Stamm’s characters. That the questions are never completely answered is what makes reading Stamm a simultaneously melancholy and cathartic experience.
Stamm has said that in writing, “I like reduction, concentration, clarity.” He produces this effect through a neutral style with no embellishments, cleansed of symbolism and self-conscious literary stylistics or pyrotechnics. There is no witty dialogue in his work, nor does he provide piercing psychological insights into his characters, rather, they reveal themselves through their actions.
“It has always been my goal to make literature out of ordinary people’s lives,” Stamm explained in an interview with The New Yorker. “I don’t like the extremes; I don’t think that they teach us much about ourselves.”
In Stamm’s fictions, wives and girlfriends leave their husbands and lovers; husbands abandon their wives and girlfriends — or reveal they have a child by another woman. Yet, throughout these traumatic events, the characters remain as calm and cultivated as the Swiss countryside. Stamm moves his actors across the arc of his narratives with the finesse of a master watchmaker, one known for his precision and his ability to create jewel-like beauty.
While Stamm is a Swiss author, his fictional settings appear for the most part devoid of locality and his deracinated characters are cloaked in a cosmopolitan air and could hail from anywhere. He generally writes about educated bourgeois professionals, or artists of some sort, but even the least intellectual of his protagonists — such as Kathrine, a barely educated customs inspector in Unformed Landscape — feel a sense of alienation and isolation from their families, communities, and friends. That is, if they happen to have them — and most of Stamm’s characters don’t.
Tension in Stamm’s writing often arises from the distance he keeps from his characters, as well as the distance they keep from each other. We never quite know how he feels about his characters. He has said, for example: “…my goal as an author is not to know everything about my characters, it’s to be true to them and sympathetic.” “Readers,” he says, “have to judge my protagonists for themselves, as they have to judge people in daily life.”
Most of Stamm’s protagonists wear a carapace of indifference to the world around them. They are like characters in a film noir who hide their anxiety that their past crimes will be discovered as they try to forge a new path to redemption. Alienated from their pasts, they have an uneasy, tenuous relationship with the present. They vacillate between feeling trapped in a life to which they are not committed and suspecting that their “real life” has not yet begun. This tension keeps them — and us — on edge, lending Stamm’s narratives a taut and expectant feel.
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In On a Day Like This, we meet Andreas, an expatriate Swiss teacher who has been living in Paris for 18 years. According to one of his girlfriends, Andreas is a nihilist because he believes “in nothing but chance.” His life in Paris has been “an endless sequence of lessons, of cigarettes, meals, cinema visits, meetings with women or friends who basically didn’t mean anything to him, incoherent lists of little events.” For him, “emptiness was the normal state of things…”
While Andreas cycles through more-or-less interchangeable lovers, his preoccupation is with his first love, Fabienne, who long ago rejected him and married someone else. Since that time, she has remained a fixed object in his mind, but “it wasn’t even Fabienne herself that he longed for, so much as the love of those years, the unconditionality of the feeling that still floored him now, twenty years later.” It is, then, not so much Fabienne for whom Andreas longs, but the sensation of being “in love” — that elusive feeling in our pleasure center when we believe our desire controls the object of our affection.
Too anxious to wait for the results of a recent biopsy that may show he has cancer, Andreas upends his life in Paris. He rids himself of his belongings, sells his apartment, and heads back to the village where he was born. He does this knowing that his potential diagnosis of cancer may only be metaphorical, and that he is really “running away from the disease that was his life, his work, his apartment, the people he called friend or lovers.” Despite his stated intentions of visiting his brother and his parent’s grave, the real purpose of the trip is to see if he can rekindle something with Fabienne, who still lives in the village.
Upon his arrival he finds Fabienne is happily married, living in “her little castle” behind a picket fence in a quiet neighborhood. She is standoffish when he arrives, more surprised than happy to see him. Andreas tells her he loves her, says that he has always loved her, and that he has never loved anyone as much as he loves her. She does not reciprocate his feelings. Nevertheless, Andreas persists in pursuing her and succeeds in seducing her. Their sexual encounter is bleak: Fabienne remains immobile, stiff, with her eyes shut, and “Andreas was put in mind of police photographs of crime scenes, pale, lifeless bodies by the side of the road, in forests or rushes.”
Having sex with Fabienne was supposed to resurrect the “intensity” and feeling of “being in love” from Andreas’s memory. But it does not. In thinking about their union afterward: “he felt nothing but a kind of jaunty indifference. It was as though he had got rid of a weight, something that had been oppressing him…” Sex failed to be the bite into the Proustian Madeleine that Andreas had hoped for. Even with the weight lifted, he is left with a horrible sensation not unlike the one Philip Larkin describes in his poem Deceptions, in which a rape is revealed as an empty exercise of power and desire that led only to bursting “into fulfillment’s desolate attic.” Realizing the abject failure of his enterprise, Andreas leaves the village and sets off to reconnect with one of his old girlfriends.
While Stamm’s male protagonists have a habit of using women as a means to an end, his female protagonists exhibit similarly unsentimental and selfish behavior. In Unformed Landscape, Kathrine leaves her husband to seek out an old acquaintance, Christian, in much the same way that Andreas sets out to reconnect with Fabienne. When Kathrine finds Christian, it is clear he does not care for her and, in fact, has a girlfriend. Even though he resists her, she manages to seduce him. He regrets their sexual encounter because it “wasn’t right.” Kathrine is unsympathetic. Christian tells her their coupling has complicated his relationship with his girlfriend and Kathrine responds by saying, “Welcome to the world” — a comment on par in its callousness with Andreas’s feeling a “jaunty indifference” after seducing Fabienne.
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In Seven Years, husband-and-wife architects Alexander and Sonia have a conventional, business-like marriage in which neither one of them appears to be particularly in love with the other. In many ways, theirs is a marriage of convenience. Sonia is “the perfect wife.” She is polite and pretty, though humorless and passionless; she is, however, ambitious. While Alexander purports to be as interested in his career as Sonia is in her own, his head is never quite in the game. They work at building their business, as well as designing a house together. But for Alexander, everything they do is nothing more than a project to be finished before moving on to the next project. Alienated from his work and indifferent toward his wife, Alexander turns to a lover in hope of relief.
The major inspiration for Seven Years was the absurdist, tragic-comedy play Ivona, the Princess of Burgundy by Witold Gombrowicz. Prince Philipp, on a walk, meets a mute, charmless, unattractive, girl, Ivona. She is awkward, apathetic, and boring. According to Gombrowicz: “From the start the prince cannot stand her; but at the same time, he cannot bear to see himself obliged to hate the wretched Ivona. He suddenly rebels against those laws of nature and gets engaged to Ivona.” The play depicts the responses of the King and the Queen and the courtiers to this outrageous provocation, and in the end Ivona is murdered. About Ivona, Gombrowicz noted, “She isn’t stupid, she’s in a stupid situation.”
What interested Stamm about the play was: “whether a woman who loves me has power over me even if I don’t love her.” In Stamm’s reconfiguring the play into a novel, Alexander meets Ivona by chance at a picnic. She is a docile and pious Polish immigrant who works in a Christian gift shop — his wife Sonia’s antithesis. Alexander becomes obsessed with this unattractive, uneducated woman who appears to have no aim in life. He cannot get her out his mind, which enrages him. The thought that she wields power over him is “a thought that simultaneously fascinates and infuriates” him.
To fight off his desire, he tells himself how disagreeable he finds Ivona, who gives him the impression of being a “natural born victim.” He wants to hurt her. Yet, on their first drunken night together, Ivona utters the fateful words, “I love you,” and they take root in his heart. He cannot extirpate them. In fact, as much as he is “irritated by her docile and long-suffering manner,” he admits to himself that “the thought of her love had something ennobling about it.” But ennoblement quickly becomes enthrallment.
Alexander comes to feel that he owns Ivona. He leaves her money for spending time with him, and he soon begins paying her to perform certain sexual acts. Though he finds the idea of paying a prostitute for sex abhorrent, he thinks, “giving money to Ivona was something different. It was not payment for services received. Ivona belonged to me, and my looking after her in that way was the justification of my claims of ownership.”
Alexander’s fascination and obsession with Ivona is similar to what Dostoyevsky describes in Notes from Underground when he defines love as consisting “precisely in the right, voluntarily granted by the beloved object, to be tyrannized over.” Alexander rules over Ivona just as the Underground Man rules over the prostitute Liza. The Underground Man finds Liza repellent but at the same time is drawn to her: “One feeling intensified the other.” Like Alexander, the Underground Man’s feelings begin with dislike but result in his subjugation of Liza, though his conquest is fraught because “afterwards he couldn’t even picture what to do with the subjugated object.”
Alexander faces the same problem with Ivona. She belongs to him and his “ownership” of her entitles him to luxuriate in post-coital bliss, which produces in him a feeling of “freedom and protectedness.” He cannot give her up, yet he will not leave his wife for her. He feels “it was as though time stood still when I was with her, which was precisely what gave those moments their weight.” Neither his wife nor his job can induce this transcendent feeling. His relationship with Ivona provides the only control he can exercise over his life, being with her is the only time he can assuage his feelings of helplessness and emptiness. The violence he inflicts upon Ivona in her small, dark room appears in proportion to his internalized rage, which he cannot act out in his everyday life or inflict upon his “perfect wife.”
When Alexander impregnates Ivona, an event that offers him a way to escape his life with Sonia, and the opportunity to start a new life with Ivona, he instead tells Sonia about his affair. He suggests that they take Ivona’s baby and raise it as their own, a suggestion to which Sonia agrees. They essentially coerce the hapless Ivona into signing papers to forfeit her child, the only thing of value she has ever produced.
Throughout the narration of his story, which he is telling to a friend, Alexander presents himself as a sympathetic character, an eminently reasonable and sensitive man. Yet, he has cheated on his wife from the beginning of their marriage and steals his mistress’s child to make amends with his wife. He drinks to excess and bears most of the responsibility for bankrupting their architectural business. He even thinks of his daughter as a “project,” like one of the buildings on which he works. When Sonia announces she is going to leave him to go work in France, he reflects: “It seemed to me that everything had just happened to me, and I was as little to blame for it as Sonia or Ivona. I wasn’t a monster, I was no better and no worse than anyone else.” While Alexander may be “no better and no worse than anyone else,” it is, of course, preposterous to claim that “everything had just happened” to him. The reader is left with the burden of determining whether Alexander is a “natural born victim” of circumstance, or whether his life-story rises to the level of the tragic for suffering successfully through what hand fate has dealt him.
*
At one point toward the end of Seven Years, Alexander stares out a window in his house, thinking: “I had the feeling that everything was possible for me just then, I could walk out of the house and never come back. It was a feeling at once liberating and frightening.”
Thomas, the protagonist of To the Back of Beyond, does just that. In this novel, Thomas and his wife Astrid are relaxing on their front porch after returning home to Switzerland from a family vacation. When Astrid goes inside to check on the children, Thomas puts down his chilled glass of wine and walks off into the night. He never returns to his home and family, absolving himself of responsibility for everything. He wanders through the mountains to Spain and throughout Europe, taking menial odd jobs when necessary, living a life of pure action — of daily struggle and survival — on his own.
Neither Thomas, nor Astrid — nor the author — ever proffer a reason for Thomas’s disappearance. Astrid sometimes hypothesizes: “He just had to go, leave. Maybe that was the explanation…it was an urge she had felt herself.” She recounts the “urge” that she had felt when she was sleep-deprived and their daughter was young and colicky, when she had gone to the train station with the intention of running away but did not. The experience left her with the realization that there is “nothing natural or inevitable about their life, and that sometime one or other of them might get lost for a while or even forever.”
For the most part, Astrid takes a philosophical view of Thomas’s departure. Stalwart in her loyalty to her husband, like Penelope, she does not remarry: “No one seemed to understand that her relationship with Thomas wasn’t over just because he wasn’t around anymore.” As the children grow up and move away, Astrid never critiques her husband’s behavior. The only criticism of his abandonment arrives when Astrid cannot afford to send Ella, their daughter, to the school she wants to attend and Ella calls her father an “asshole” for “dumping” them.
Stamm offers no explanations for this couple’s behavior. He has said, “I do not like to psychologize, I use the perceptions of my characters to show how they feel.” Thus, he shows Thomas living in nature, presented through his experience of the flora, fauna, and landscapes that surround him, with little or no rumination about why he wanders around like a nomad instead of remaining at home like a normal, bourgeois family man.
Unlike the journeys undertaken by characters in Stamm’s other books, Thomas’s journey has no destination outside a kind of ceaseless, Brownian motion. “Not everything you did had a reason,” Thomas declares. He lives a life in the eternal present. In the mountains: “he felt suddenly present as never before; it was as though he had no past and no future. There was only this day and this path on which he was slowly making his way up the mountain.”
In a rare moment of reflection on his past, Thomas recalls what he felt about his family just after their last time together on vacation: “The feeling that had kept sneaking up on him then that he could never get close enough to them, that they were inevitably distancing themselves from him, as though following a law of nature.” By leaving suddenly, he executes an action that he felt was ultimately inevitable, ending with a single gesture a process that would have taken years of pain to unfold. Thomas’s sentiment aligns with Stamm’s outlook on relationships: “All relationships end badly. Even if you stay together for the rest of your life, at some point one of you will die, and then the other.”
There is no closure in To the Back of Beyond. Stamm’s masterful storytelling technique makes it possible for us to believe that Thomas died shortly after leaving home by falling into a mountain crevasse; or that, when aged, he may have fallen off some scaffolding while working with a construction crew; or that he may still be wandering the mountains, ready to walk back into his house and surprise Astrid one day.
*
Stamm takes for granted that we live in a postmodern, post-existential world, one in which the ruling ideology is a metaphysics of meaninglessness. A world in which absurdity has become the status quo. In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus writes, “that the absurd arises because the world fails to meet our demands for meaning.” As an appropriate response to absurdity, he suggests that one adapt an attitude of scorn toward the world.
Unlike Camus, Stamm’s characters do not see their predicaments as arising from a world that has failed them. And they do not see scorn or defiance against the world as answers to their condition of isolation and alienation. Perhaps this is because, in thinking about absurdity, Stamm appears to be more aligned with the philosopher Thomas Nagel than he is with Camus. In his essay The Absurd, Nagel dismisses Camus’s articulation and suggests instead that a situation is absurd when there is “a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality. Consequently, the absurdity of our situation derives not from a collision between our expectations and the world, but from a collision within ourselves.”
This “collision within ourselves,” generates the turmoil against which Stamm’s protagonists struggle and what propels the narrative dynamic of his novels. Either life events — a wife’s discovery that her husband has lied about who he is, an identity crisis instigated by a car accident, or a portentous diagnosis — or an inexplicable spontaneous urge to flee, cause the collision and place the antagonist in an absurd situation. In every novel except Agnes, Stamm’s protagonists embark on journeys to find their way out of this absurdity, which typically involves the search for love and the possibility of the feeling of transcendence through love.
In the Stammian universe love presents a perpetual problem because being in love entails an attachment to another person, a bind that diminishes each person’s freedom. As far back as Agnes, the narrator of the story, speaking about the eponymous heroine, notes that he loved Agnes and had been happy with her, but “it was only when she wasn’t there that I felt I was free. And my freedom had always mattered more to me than my happiness.”
Love provides pleasure, the cessation of pain, and a distraction from the feeling of emptiness. Stamm’s characters anxiously balance their yearning for freedom and their desire for happiness — aware as they are of the possible irresolvable, existential conflict between them. We come to care for the characters in his novels — despite the fact they are often unsympathetic and recklessly pursue their goals — because we recognize that their desires are our desires: for love, freedom, happiness. Of course, attaining any one of these is problematic for anyone — disappointment and disillusionment a distinct possibility — which is likely why a certain melancholy pall hovers over the endings of Stamm’s novels. Yet, as he escorts his characters off the page, he allows us to imagine that they are “not unhappy,” the nuance of the double negative hinting at the possibility of happiness without positively acknowledging it.
At the conclusion of Unformed Landscape, after leaving her second husband and embarking on an unsuccessful search for love, Kathrine returns to an old flame named Morten. She is 28 and preparing once again to leave the Norwegian village in which she was born and raised, this time with Morten by her side. She counts the men who have been in her life: “Helge, Thomas, Christian, Morten.” Her possessions: “Three thousand kronor in her bank account, a few books, a few clothes, a few bits of kitchen equipment. A laptop. A kid.” That is her life. She and Morten move away from the village and find jobs. Her son grows up, and then she and Morten have a child together. The story ends: “It was fall, then winter. It was summer. It got dark, and then it got light again.”
Read my interview with Peter Stamm.
This essay—edited and revised—originally appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.