The appearance of freedom

There is something chilling about the prose of Swiss-German author Peter Stamm. It is so stripped-down and restrained that the reader is forever expecting an explosion of imagery, or at least a faint puff of poetry—but it never arrives. His interest lies in people, their desires and motivations. The mundane is his milieu.

Where modernists like James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield sought to defamiliarise the everyday world, Stamm makes his characters more real by cutting away literary artifice. Only actions and speech remain. This style clearly owes a debt to Hemingway, and Stamm shares his fascination with heterosexual love and the natural world. But Stamm's 21st-century, post-industrial Europe is very different to the continent that Hemingway depicted. Anomie and alienation are now the status quo, not just the prerogative of artists and intellectuals. And this finds its reflection in Stamm’s sparse style.

Until the 2012 publication of his novel Seven Years, Stamm’s work was little known in the Anglophone world. That work was a departure for the author, replacing the meandering journeys of his previous novels with a rigid, traditional plot structure that befits the architect narrator and his fascination with form.

Charting the course of a love triangle over 18 years, Seven Years is told largely in reverse, before returning to the present at the novel’s conclusion. We see the handsome, lower-middle-class Alex becoming involved with the "completely unattractive" Polish illegal immigrant Ivona. Soon after their initial sexless liaison, Alex embarks on a relationship with the upper-middle-class Sonia, whom he swiftly marries. Sonia is also a recent architecture graduate and the perfect catch, despite there being "something unapproachable about her." She is, the narrator is at pains to point out, "the absolute opposite of Ivona."

Like Philip Roth, Stamm forensically examines the minutiae of male sexuality. Alex, as with many of Stamm's male characters, likes to think of the relationships in competitive terms: as games to be played out between different parties, transactions to be made. He knows that it would be sensible simply to settle down with his wife but a "physical thing" ties him to Ivona, making him "dependent" on her. Whether it is boredom, a self-destructive urge or a lack of fulfilment that causes him to cheat, his repeat offences appear to be subtle transgressions against aspirational bourgeois society. Again, like many of Stamm's characters, a feeling of entrapment and loss of freedom—not just within the relationship but also life in general—seems to be a powerful force behind Alex's actions. As one character notes: "If you expect a certain standard of living, there's only the appearance of freedom for you anyway."

Many of the motifs and themes of Seven Years echo through Stamm's latest book, We're Flying (Granta, £14.99), a short-story collection originally published in the German-speaking world as two separate books, either side of Seven Years. Two of the stories even have male architects as their protagonist. But there is easily enough variety in these 22 stories to keep the reader engaged. The first story in the collection, "Expectations," is a perfect case in point. As a single woman goes to check on her upstairs neighbour, the reader is led to expect the action to follow a specific genre route (in this case, horror or thriller), but it spins off in an unexpected direction. The story’s title does not just refer to the protagonist. Another, "Summer Folk," is part mystery, part psychological drama and part philosophical reflection, taking its title from the Maxim Gorky play of the same name. "We are summer folk in our own country, we traveled here from somewhere... we do nothing." In short, there is no archetypal Stamm story.

What separates Stamm from many other practitioners of the realist short story is his subtlety. His work does not rely on a sudden, schematic intrusion of violence on the domestic. Many stories focus on relationships and the romantic love between a man and a woman—and all the doubts, crises, distance and triumphs that that entails. "It has always been my goal to make literature out of ordinary people's lives," says Stamm. These people's lives are often sad and isolated, but the atmosphere, although often ominous, is not completely without humour or joy.

When reading several of the stories, I was reminded of the work of that other icy Germanic master, the director Michael Haneke. The emotional breakdown of the young teacher in "The Hurt," for instance, in which he burns all his books and belongings, owes a debt to the Austrian's debut film, The Seventh Continent, in which a bourgeois family destroy all of their possessions before committing suicide. Another story, "Videocity," further examines the relationship between image and reality and the negative impact of Hollywood, a favourite theme of Haneke's from the gruelling Benny's Video onwards. In Stamm's story, we witness the descent of a video-shop worker into Truman Show-style paranoia, the narrative attempting to render film techniques in prose as the protagonist remembers scenes from his childhood ("His eye is the camera. The garden smudges in the accelerating movement, a green blur. Cut."). At its climax, the man "only watches videos. They are his last connection to the outside world."

Despite its occasional clumsy rendering of German compound nouns ("never-being-alone") and the mixing up British and American English (e.g. "slicker" instead of "cagoule," yet "cannon" instead of "carom"), Michael Hofmann's translation is precise and irresistibly readable. There is something extraordinary in Stamm’s ability to make normal situations, described in such minimalist prose, so engrossing and affecting. His triumph, as Updike had it, is "to give the mundane its beautiful due."