The 3 best books by the ingenious Peter Stamm

Restlessness, in the broadest and most favorable sense of the term, is the essence of a writer like Peter stamm. A guy seasoned in letters from the most authentic self-taught, the one who does not have godparents or letters of recommendation. And of course, stumbling along is something natural to the condition of the creator of any field who discovers his creative vein without having prior family roots or relevant contacts in the current world. Only in the end there are also opportunities for authentic genius, despite everything.

His novel Agnes was the key, that work of undeniable quality that ended up breaking down the usual walls erected against the disinherited and the profane in a world like the literary in this case.

Stamm's is a intimacy existentialist, surprised, dreamlike, alienated and at the same time sublimated by its concise and brilliant form towards that very personal imprint. An unmistakable stamp always necessary to detect narrators different from the mediocrity and thus be able to observe the world and the characters that we are all with new prisms.

Top 3 recommended novels by Peter Stamm

Agnes

Perhaps it was something of the novelty of his proposal. The thing is, publishers slammed the door on various occasions in the early days of Stamm. Until Agnes broke through with her particular gestures, excesses and other descriptive resources loaded with beauty and significance.

When fiction strives to shape reality and reaches its limits, the consequences are often unpredictable. Literary fantasy acquires relevance and density, in the same way that magic does when it provokes the acts that it has decided to invoke with its spells.

Peter Stamm, a shocking new name in European narrative, creates in this first novel a space in which art and life, literature and reality govern a dense and indivisible plot, where literature seems to be the dominant force in the destiny of a pair of obstinate lovers in conjuring it. Burning and painful, Agnes reveals to us a voice of rare singularity in the literary panorama of this turn of the century.

Agnes

Ride through

When big decisions are postponed indefinitely sometimes these are the ones who end up taking the helm of one's destiny in the most unexpected way ...

Thomas and Astrid live with their two children in a cozy town in Switzerland. One night, while having a glass of wine in the garden, one of the children demands their attention, so Astrid enters the house to tend him, convinced that her husband will follow her in a few moments.

However, Thomas gets up and, after a moment's hesitation, opens the gate and leaves. Without the ties of everyday life—family, friends, work—Thomas sets off on a walking route through the mountains, exposed for the first time to the relentless alpine winter. At home, Astrid wonders first where he has gone, then when he will return, and finally, if he is still alive.

Once again, Peter Stamm reveals his extraordinary ability to turn the ordinary into awe inspiring by portraying the fragility of the contemporary world, which seems to turn the lives of its characters into a succession of painful ruptures and the possibility of getting to know themselves and others. others, in a chimera.

Ride through

Marcia from Vermont

There are scenes, looks, aromas, kisses or any other details that can remain suspended in one's memory. Between the memorable memory and the anxious claim of an old lost paradise. Guilt often slides from the sum of discards that life accumulates after dilemmas and dilemmas of a path that perhaps we could never choose if we already failed in the first choices...

A two-month stay in an artist colony in Vermont confronts Peter, the narrator of this story, with the ghosts of his past: suddenly everything seems to remind him of Marcia, the woman he met thirty years ago, when he was a young artist trying to make a name for himself in the Big Apple.

The Christmas they spent together, he discovers now, could have changed his life forever, and the haunting solitude of the ghostly snowy landscape that surrounds him only invites him to revisit those days of discovery and abandonment, and to imagine the life he did not have. Peter Stamm captures with the mastery and precision that characterize him that painful gap between lived reality and the fantasy of what could have been that often accompanies maturity.

Marcia from Vermont
5/5 - (29 votes)

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