Unformed Landscape: A Novel - Hardcover

Peter Stamm; Michael Hofmann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590511409 ISBN 13: 9781590511404

Publisher: Other Press, 2005

Synopsis

Unformed Landscape begins in a small village on a fjord in the Finnmark, on the northeastern coast of Norway, where the borders between Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia lie covered in snow and darkness, where the real borders are between day and night, summer and winter, and between people. Here, a sensitive young woman like Kathrine finds few outlets for her desires. Half Norwegian, half Sami (an indigenous people), Kathrine works for the customs office inspecting the fishing boats arriving regularly in the harbor. She is in her late 20s, has a son from an early marriage, and has drifted into a second loveless marriage to a man whose cold and dominating conventionality forms a bold stroke through the unformed landscape of her life. After she makes a discovery about her husband that deeply wounds her, Kathrine cuts loose from her moorings and her confusion and sets off in search of herself.

Her journey begins aboard a ship headed south, taking her below the Arctic Circle for the first time in her life. Kathrine makes her way to France and has the bittersweet experience of a love affair that flares and dies quickly, her starved senses rewarded by the shimmering beauty of Paris. Through a series of poignant encounters, Kathrine is led to the richer life she was meant to have and is brave enough to claim.

Using simple words strung together in a melodic alphabet, Peter Stamm introduces us, through a series of intimate sketches, to the heart of an unforgettable woman. Her story speaks eloquently about solitude, the fragility of love, lost illusions, and self-discovery.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Stamm is the author of the novels The Sweet Indifference of the World, To the Back of Beyond, All Days Are Night, Seven Years, On a Day Like This, Unformed Landscape, and Agnes, and the short-story collections We’re Flying and In Strange Gardens and Other Stories. His award-winning books have been translated into more than forty languages. For his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction, he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. He lives in Switzerland.
 
Michael Hofmann has translated the work of Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Peter Stephan Jungk, and many others. He is the author of several books of poems and a book of essays, Behind the Lines, and is the editor of the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry. In 2012 he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida and London.

Reviews

If Albert Camus had lived in an age when people in remote Norwegian fishing villages had e-mail, he might have written a novel like this. Kathrine, a customs inspector, abandons husband and son, because she's unsure whether she has "missed anything or not." In Paris and beyond, she connects with a series of men, and, after finding the world much as she expected (a garden café in Paris looks "the way a Norwegian who has never seen a garden café might imagine one to look"), returns to her fjord in Finnmark. In Stamm's portrait, a scenario that could have been half-baked captures what seems a particularly Nordic view of adult life: austere pragmatism mixed with mordant wit.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Twentysomething Kathrine lives in a small village on the northeastern coast of Norway, Land of the Midnight Sun. There the seasons are marked by long periods of light and darkness, the aging of residents by increased impatience and frustration with the dark and the cold. A trip on cross-country skis to visit the keepers of the lighthouse constitutes an outing. As a customs inspector of the fishing boats docking there, Kathrine, though she has never been south of the Arctic Circle, touches the lives of far-travelers. She lives with the boy born of her short-lived marriage to a man she sees routinely and comfortably about the village. Her second marriage to cold, officious Thomas, who doesn't touch her, leads to his family's condemnation of her and her subsequent journey away from home, son, job, parents, and townspeople. Hofmann's translation of Stamm's clipped German flows smoothly yet as powerfully as the waters that surround Kathrine's restrictive life and carry her far away but closer to herself than ever. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Other Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590511409
• ISBN 13: 9781590511404
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 168