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Staff Pick
Can changing the course of our present life path actually alter the story fabric of the past?
Playing with determinism, and calling into question the construct of reality, what makes this novel so irresistible is its simplicity of delivery. Christoph feels he is watching his own past relationship mirrored identically in a younger couple, so he pursues them, wishing to inform them of their inevitable demise. Aberrations begin to appear between to the two couples' story lines, however, even as Christoph begins pulling on the threads of his memories, causing unexpected turns and opening new doorways beyond what he thought possible. Recommended By Aubrey W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SEASON BY VOGUE
In this alluring, melancholic novel — Peter Stamm at his best — a writer haunted by his double blurs the line between past and present, fiction and reality, in his attempt to outrun the unknown.
"Please come to Skogskyrkogården tomorrow at 2. I have a story I want to tell you." Lena agrees to Christoph’s out-of-the-blue request, though the two have never met. In Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery, he tells her his story, which is also somehow hers. Twenty years before, he loved a woman named Magdalena–an actress like Lena, with her looks, her personality, her past. Their breakup inspired him to write his first novel, about the time they were together, and in its scenes Lena recognizes the uncanny, intimate details of her own relationship with an aspiring writer, Chris.
Is it possible that she and Chris are living the same lives as Magdalena and Christoph two decades apart? Are they headed towards the same scripted separation? Or, in the fever of writing, has Christoph lost track of what is real and what is imagined?
In this subtle, kaleidoscopic tale, Peter Stamm exposes a fundamental human yearning: to beat life’s mysteries by forcing answers on questions that have yet to be fully asked.
Review
"The Sweet Indifference of the World explores questions of time, identity, and art in prose that is dreamy, melancholic, and beautiful." Book Riot
Review
"Adroitly translated by the award-winning Hofmann, [Stamm] explores the timeless doppelgänger phenomenon through dual couples whose fleeting interactions engender intriguing questions about singularity and agency and confirm the impossibility of absolutely sure answers." Booklist
Review
"Excellent...this amorphous tale folds in on itself, becoming a meditation on how memory can distort reality...Fans of Julian Barnes will love this." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Acclaimed Swiss writer Peter Stamm tells the mysterious, complex story of a time-traveling love affair that tests the boundaries of reality and raises as many questions as it answers." Vogue, Best Books to Read This Winter
About the Author
Peter Stamm is the author of the novels To The Back of Beyond, Agnes, All Days Are Night, Seven Years, On a Day Like This, and Unformed Landscape, 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 thirty 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 the work of Gottfried Benn, Hans Fallada, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and many others. In 2012 he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His Selected Poems was published in 2009, Where Have You Been? Selected Essays in 2014, and One Lark, One Horse: Poems in 2019. He lives in Florida and London.
Peter Stamm on PowellsBooks.Blog
When people tell me they can’t live without books, it always sounds to me like they’re owning up to a weakness. I’m not saying I’d like to live without books myself, but it might be worth striving for a state where books were increasingly superfluous...
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