The Sweet Indifference of the World

October 7, 2019
Swiss novelist Stamm (To the Back of Beyond) ruminates on fictions of the past and the recursive nature of time in this excellent doppelganger tale. Cristoph, a successful Swiss writer living in Stockholm, notices an actor with a startling resemblance to his ex-girlfriend and, after following her, sends a note to her hotel room: “Please come to the forest cemetery tomorrow, two p.m. I have a story to tell.” The actor, Lena, is unnerved that Cristoph divulges intimate details about her life and the work of her aspiring novelist boyfriend, Chris. As the two walk through Stockholm, Cristoph tells Lena of a time when he returned to his home village and stayed in a hotel where he used to work as a night porter. When he arrived late, the porter on duty was “like looking into a mirror.” As Cristoph unspools his theory about Lena being a doppelgänger for his former girlfriend, Magdelena (who was also an actor), this amorphous tale folds in on itself, becoming a meditation on how memory can distort reality: “It’s like having a play put on by several directors. The scenes look different, even the words can be changed or cut, but the action follows its unvarying course.” Fans of Julian Barnes will love this.

November 1, 2019
A novel about a novelist who has apparently obliterated the distinction between life and literature. The narrator, a writer named Christoph, enjoyed breakthrough success with a novel detailing his romance with an actress named Magdalena. He had arrived at a crossroads, in both his relationship and his fiction, where he felt he had to choose between romantic happiness and literary fulfillment. The novel which had begun as a love story thus became a story of that love falling apart. "I didn't wreck my life...I decided in favor of literature, and made certain sacrifices," he explains to a younger woman named Lena, which is, of course, short for Magdalena. She is also an actress and is in love with an aspiring writer named Chris, who appears to be writing the same novel that Christoph had already written. What's going on here? Lena thinks she knows: "There are simple explanations for everything, she said in a cheery voice. What's that then? I asked. You're mad, and this is all a product of your imagination." Maybe so, but, if so, Lena might also be a product of the novelist's imagination, and perhaps Magdalena as well, just as all of these characters are the products of the imagination of the Swiss novelist who has made a career out of such literary postmodern gamesmanship (All Days Are Night, 2014, etc.). This novel we're reading might well be the same one the fictional novelist has written, or is rewriting, the one that brought him the breakthrough success, the one that he could never follow with another. This is the novel he is explaining in great detail to Lena, in short chapters alternating with other short chapters that detail what is going on between them, and what is going on between her and her Chris, and what parallels there are between these lives they are leading and the life with Magdalena that inspired his novel some 15 years earlier. "Maybe I was just imagining everything," the novelist as narrator ponders at one point, recalling a period of his life that "was all so long ago now that it seemed unreal in my memory, like a bad dream on waking up." Art imitates life, or life imitates art, or something.

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November 1, 2019
Enigma? Wormhole? Mere coincidence? Once upon a time, writer Christophe and actor Magdalena shared a life together. Their relationship falls prey to art? I had believed I had to decide between her and my writing ?and then Christophe pens a successful novel inspired by their parting. Fast forward 20 years to Christophe and Lena, Magdalena's virtual double, walking through Stockholm into the wee hours as Christophe attempts to convince Lena, an actor with a writer partner named Chris, that so much of what she's lived and will live seems to be on repeat. As more details unfold, Christophe and Magdalena's memories, beyond a few admitted deviations, of how they met, fell in love, and combined their lives are inexplicably in close sync with Chris and Lena's experiences, never mind the two-decade difference in timing. Man Booker International Prize finalist Stamm (To the Back of Beyond, 2017), whose German original is adroitly translated by the award-winning Hofmann, explores the timeless doppelg�nger phenomenon through dual couples whose fleeting interactions engender intriguing questions about singularity and agency and confirm the impossibility of absolutely sure answers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)