The Gentle Indifference of the World of Peter Stamm Review

Christopher’s writing career is idle. It’s been fifteen years since his first and only book was published and found enough attention to attract audiences to this day for reading tours. As the relationship with Magdalene, from whom he told in his first, failed after three years, including Christopher’s artistic ambitions are silted. The memories of Magdalena accompany the fifties course unabated until his dreams After a reading evening in his hometown happens to Christoph Frappierendes. In the night porter of the hotel he means to recognize as a young man himself.

The doppelganger shaft proves to be comprehensive. The young man, Chris called, lives in the same house as he once, is also a writer, even his girlfriend Lena resembles the Magdalena at the time, and both are actresses

Christoph banned and worried. Life both his own life to be an imitation? Or he has lived out her as a trial run? ? Affected, damaged or now amend each step, the fate of the other In Stockholm, Christoph agreed (the narrator) with twenty years younger Lena and offers her: “I’ll want to tell my story.

” He sees this as a warning. Of course Lena is stunned that the elderly gentleman nothing they told him about himself and Chris, surprised that it seems her life so familiar. they by the novelist at the threshold of old age her his life and his failed love story about Magdalena disclose ( “a story about our separation and about the impossibility of love”), it must be feared that the development of their own relationship with Chris element of be Doppelexistenzialität and they could not develop their future as free as she believes.

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What would remain other choice but to endure the “gentle indifference of the world”, which is watching us people unconcerned, as we seek to make our existence? Hoping for a glimpse of their own future, urging Lena, Christoph was to reveal her how because everything emanates. But that is impossible for him. In life, he says, there are no rules as in stories. “A literary text needs a shape, a consistency that has not our life … One end have stories in books.” And “happiness does not make good stories”. All this has Christoph experienced. Magdalena’s advice, “a book about you and me about our lives, our love” to write, helped him though from a writer’s block, but led him into a dilemma.

He was the more he wrote about Magdalena, the more familiar this literary creature while he was his real role model foreign. The realization startled him, and he is skeptical of “big words and feelings, doubt not only on those of others, but also on my own.” Of course, it is not in the duplication to disk repetitions. Especially the cracks and fractures in the alleged reflections fascinate and confuse the protagonists as the reader. They provoke questions about the nature of his own existence, according to predestination, coincidences and freedom. Had Christoph, the younger self, trodden other ways with the knowledge that everything will happen after a reset in the form of Chris’? Would have taken a different turn life, they would have never met?

Saying that Lena cares, Christoph had intervened as a writer in “our lives,” pure “out of curiosity to try out what happens.” But the fictional actors can not escape simply act differently than expected her prescribed by Christoph role? Incidentally, the book in question may not exist yes. “How can this book still hot times, I will write that in a few years and you want to have long since published?” Asks Chris when he meets Christopher. The title is nowhere to be found and not included in the catalog of the Central Library once. The end result is the most radical question: Was it all just fiction, Christopher’s life has absolutely not taken place

In his short novel – 155 airy pages – maneuvered Peter Stamm his characters like a chessboard in sophisticated trains back and ago. It features a refined juggling realities, dreams and fiction, with past and present gather pace, change time frames seamlessly and often unnoticed. Although aesthetically satisfying, this simple and feathery easily formulated, windblown of weightless melancholy Künstlerroman not everyone. The emphasis is on the intellectual appeal of philosophical questions, which serve arg artificial overall design and the fantastic in the core basic motive. At the end of the novel, the narrator recalls an experience at twenty. During a walk in his snowy home village he sees on the other side of the river an old gentleman who fell on the steep road and can not get up without help.

The young man brings the confused old man, who tells of a woman who “had gone for a walk with him,” return to the men’s hostel. The picture suggests that the beginning and end of the narrator come together. Because the young man has the maturity of age, and the old man something links him, “what goes much deeper than words, as if we were one, a four-legged creature, both old and young, at the beginning and the end.” Before began life correctly, he imagines his end, “freed from all […] without leaving a trace.” The idea is not correct him sad, but appears to him ‘appropriate and on a clear beauty and accuracy. “< By the way, is the title of a quote from the essay” The Myth of Sisyphus “(1941) of the existentialists and Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus: “La tendre indifférence du monde”.