Seven Years

January 31, 2011
Swiss author Stamm (Agnes) examines the complications of love and attraction in this captivating novel. Alex and his gorgeous and brilliant wife, Sonia, run an architecture firm and have a lovely daughter. It is the life he always thought he deserved, but during the fateful seventh year of marriage Alex scratches a familiar itch with Ivona, an old flame who is so tremendously plain and boring that Alex considers himself too good for her, and yet, for reasons inexplicable, his attraction to her runs hotter than it ever has for Sonia. His revulsion toward Ivona's fundamental underwhelmingness gets a lengthy—at times, tediously so—examination, as does the magnetism that pulls him to her and his own fiery self-hatred. Ego, passion, and deception run wild, but the novel's strength is found in the characters Stamm has created: powerfully imperfect, sometimes despicable, horribly conflicted, and always believable far beyond the archetypes that too often pop up in novels of marital ennui.

January 15, 2011

One man steers an erratic course between two women in this wan account of a quasi-obsession, the latest from the Swiss Stamm (On a Day Like This, 2008, etc.). 

In the framing device, Alex, a married German architect, is telling Antje, an expatriate German artist, about the Other Woman. His story begins in 1989. He's an architecture student in Munich. In a beer garden, a friend sets him up with a young woman who's been eyeing him. This is Ivona, from Poland, a clerk in a Catholic bookstore. She's plain, passive, inarticulate, quite without charm, "a natural-born victim," yet Alex, perversely, finds himself drawn to her. He spends the night with her. They don't have sex, yet Ivona says she loves him; her unwavering devotion is her only appeal. The second time he comes close to raping her. Then she fades into the background as Alex travels to Marseilles with Sonia, another architecture student. She is everything that Ivona is not. They make love. After some twists and turns, Alex and Sonia get married; she accepts his assurance that he's broken up with Ivona. They start their own firm; business is booming, but they can't make a baby. Alex starts seeing Ivona again. She becomes pregnant. Alex suggests to Sonia that they raise the child together. Implausibly, she agrees. What might have been a moment of high drama passes for nothing as the narrative voice drones on. And the cold question recurs: Why should we care about these people? OK, perhaps Sonia a little. This smart, beautiful, warm-hearted woman is trapped in the wrong marriage and the wrong novel. But the almost mute Ivona is an unformed lump of clay, and Alex is a self-pitying creep who proves, in due course, a neglectful parent to little Sophie. By the end, nothing has really changed.

A monster with a full-bore obsession might have been fun to read about, but that's not what's on offer in this damp squib.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2011

A German architect with a beautiful wife cannot give up his desire for an otherwise unremarkable Polish immigrant. Despite talking to her initially as a joke, a dare, he makes her his mistress and returns to her over the years. In this account of their affair, feverish as an Orhan Pamuk or Knut Hamsun tale, motivations are by subterfuge: "I thought what a thin veneer civilization is, and how easily it cracks when pain or hatred or lust take over in individuals." Swiss novelist Stamm (Unformed Landscape) offers a classic love triangle that reads like a contemporary European version of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. Theories of architecture are employed throughout to great if heavy-handed effect ("I remember something that Aldo Rossi had said, that every room contains an abyss"), and though readers may not identify with or even like the characters, the plot moves quickly and winds in satisfying ways. VERDICT Readers looking for a highbrow page-turner will relish this quick read.--Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2011
Alex is trapped between two loves in this heartbreaking novel translated from the German. Living in Munich as an architecture student, he finds himself surprisingly ambivalent about his desires for the future and his goals in life. Just after graduation, he falls in love with two women. Sonia is gorgeous, prudent, and driven. His warm love of Sonia quickly turns into marriage and the start of their jointly owned architecture firm. Ivona, on the other hand, is ugly and taciturn, yet it is her boring air and puerile notions of love that set off a spark in Alex. He begins a long, tormented affair with Ivona that eventually leaves her pregnant. When Sonia, infertile but desperately wanting children, agrees to raise Ivonas baby with Alex as their own, Alex believes he can end the affair and rectify his marriage. But tensions escalate, and financial hardship, along with long-endured emotional estrangement, threatens to collapse their world. This touching novel is a tour of what makes love work and what tears love apart in the modern world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)