The plot is this: Christoph writes a letter to Lena, a young actress he has never met, telling her to join him in a cemetery at 2pm because he has a story he wishes to tell her. She does so, and he tells her the story of his life with a former girlfriend, Magdalena, also an actress, a story which is eerily similar to that of Lena’s own life with her boyfriend Chris. The two spend the evening walking all over Stockholm comparing lives and making Lena question if her relationship with Chris is bound for the same ending as Christoph and Magdalena’s.
Now, I have a lot of thoughts about this novel. I feel like some of them could possibly be accounted for by the fact that I don’t know what life and culture is like in Sweden (where the novel takes place) or Switzerland (where the author is from). Now that I’ve said that, I have huge qualms with the idea of a young woman meeting a complete stranger in a cemetery because he “wants to tell her a story.” What? Again, I don’t know how things work in Sweden, but if someone sent me a note like that to my HOTEL ROOM, I would be running for the hills, not going to have a chat. So in that sense I find this book a bit implausible. Granted, you have to E.F.’s visit* novels when you read them, and the rule of the world is she meets him so let’s move beyond that.
The other not so much issue as challenge I had with this novel is it’s formatting. It reminded me in many ways of the formatting of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai which frequently switched perspectives between paragraphs without warning. This felt even more difficult to navigate in Stamm’s novel, as the characters would go back in forth speaking in a single paragraph with no quotations or ‘he said/she said.’ I found myself more than once going back over a paragraph and trying to figure out who was saying what. This is somewhat of a qualm because I find it hard to believe that the English translation would take stylistic liberties in the process of going from German to English, so I have to assume that it is just Stamm’s style. I guess I’ll never really know for sure though since I don’t speak a lick of German.
My last critique of this book has to do with the ending. The final chapter of the book switches perspectives entirely from the first person narrative of Christoph to what I am assuming is Chris’ POV. Young Chris seems to encounter old Christoph who at this moment in the novel is practically speaking incoherently and seems a little bit out of his mind. My only real issue with this is that the entirety of the novel now feels unreliable because of these two pages. What was the point of making the reader so deeply trust and believe Christoph is the author was going to make everything seem like a figment of the imagination at the end?
All in all though, it was still a nice book with some descriptive language that I really enjoyed.
Favorite line: “But her lateness wasn’t significant, she was always unpunctual, not in the aggressive way of showing the person waiting that their time is worth less than hers, more from a kind of vagueness with which she approaches everything in her life.”
Rating 7/10
*”EFs Visit to a Small Planet” by E Fuchs