Whether you continued to try and swim. The brief moment when you went down, before you suffocated. When you stopped struggling for breath, stopped thrashing about with your arms. The instant in which he'd given up, and maybe swam a couple more strokes, not to get to the surface, there was no point, and he knew it. A couple of strokes. And the calm, the quiet under the water. The fact that the last moment is supposed to be happy. I read Peter Stamm's Unformed Landscape earlier this year. I've wished that it was the day that I read that book many times since. The day would have to end again and I would wish that it could be when I was curled up in the chair in the public library reading room with my book. It is probably one of my favorite books I've read in 2013, despite the missing stars. The four stars is the ending that shuts off. It is the meeting someone and you hope you can be quiet and breathe together but then time inches by and they never call you and the voice in your head starts up again to say they turned into everyone else you felt dumb around. I don't know if it is another direction. I don't want to say it is the too loose endings tied up in a neat bow kind of ending. If someone steps out from you were under my nose and I couldn't smell the good right in front of me is an easy ending and I'm too bitter to accept it I don't want to admit that just yet. Kathrine and her could be something more friend turns into something more and they are a family. It's not too happy that I can't believe it. My nose doesn't freeze to the cold glass of a warm room far away, not quite. But it ends and I have not caught up. It had fit this place inside of me and it was water. It moved on without me and a life will take place without me. Everything was bigger and noisier, there were more people around, more cars on the streets. But she had hardly seen anything that she hadn't seen at home or in Tromso. There's not a lot of room in a person, she thought. Kathrine runs away from her Finnmark village of Tromso. She was a custom's officer. She looked into cargo holds of ships and she drank cheap coffee. She still lived in the same town as her ex-husband, the father of her son Randy (named after a country singer he liked. My guess is Randy Travis. I am surprised that Randy would be on the register of legal names. Of course, the author is Swiss and he didn't know or maybe I'm mistaken about Norway having the same laws as Sweden. Randy is distracting, anyway. I imagined the Randys I have known and they were not little Nordic boys). She was still living in her old apartment that is moved into without her when her new husband slowly removes traces of all Kathrine's personality. Good-bye to her American paperback thrillers and ugly furniture. They are moved into his upper class parent's home without her word of protest or consent. Her son is moved into their life, his son now, their grandchild. She could be standing in the doorway of their don't touch anything nice home. Nothing to do with her hands and nothing to do with her expressions. Kathrine doesn't touch anything. Kathrine takes all of the money she has in the bank and runs away.She doesn't see the sky on her journey to Paris. She sits in stations and on buses and sleeps with the shades drawn from daylight. I know that it was funny-sad and more sad than funny that when she does to Paris she sees a fish factory that looks exactly like the fish factory she managed to escape (most don't). She goes to Paris to see the Danish Christian (a fine Christian name) she met when he worked for the fish factory in Tromso. He sets up her email account. They write for a little while. They stop writing and she gets married. He never tried to kiss her. Kathrine meets people, she meets men. There is attraction there in the nothing to do with your hands and expression. A placeholder. One tour guide on a ship takes her to his home. He sits on the floor outside the bathroom. He will tell his wife about her. The half Sammi Kathrine is exotic and I feel numb to attraction between characters in books most times. I cannot see the desire in their eyes. This background noise of man-woman goes by like the view on a train for me. It would be sad that she goes all of this way to see Christian. That she stands in the doorway first in his home and his mother gives her the what are you doing here look. Is it because she is exotic? I could shrivel in that what are you doing here look. I run away with her. I don't care that Christian isn't really going to be there when she pushes for something to do, to sleep together. There's no connection. I loved it when Kathrine watches the people doing the little life things and images what it would be like to be them, to be French, to do their things. It isn't different, really. You could do those things. I always know I can do those things too and it is still my favorite thing to do to go somewhere else and feel such envy of strangers. Fruit sellers, two girls in a library picking out music. I felt such envy for this bus driver in Bilbao. I mapped out where he was going and how lucky he was to live somewhere else that I didn't live, to be someone that wasn't me. When Kathrine counts out her change on the bus station table and reads her American thrillers (I don't enjoy these kinds of books at all) I could be watching her too and feel that envy. I was so happy when Kathrine finally got to join the stupid polar bear club the men in her life never let her join. She gets a post card and some dumb coin. I want to join the polar bear club. I wanted to drink coffee with her Russian sea captain friend from her customs job in Finnmark.But what about the son she doesn't know she loves because she didn't think about what it would feel like to lose him? The son she considers more her cold husband's son? The husband who lied to her about everything all along and she follows him to find he has been sitting in one of those fishing shacks to play cards instead of running. Kathrine lets go and they catch up to her like the image on the web cam focused on her village. Images caught in seconds freeze frame and across the street. It must be always cold and dark from that view and you have to go inside to be warm and not think about things. I would miss the sun and it is funny-sad that Kathrine doesn't see the sun when she runs away. What does she see that she didn't already see at home? I wouldn't want to go home either. I would want to do the things I could do as someone else doing them. It is different that way, less you alone. I loved it when her money almost runs out she is temporarily reprieved when she meets these traveling Swedish girls. The awkward imposing on their temporarily friendly company. Stay with us, we'll pay, it doesn't matter you don't have any money. The Nordic men like you better. You don't have any money. Sit on the bed and feel miserable. Listen to their easy laughter together. The one girl is nice. It feels so precarious, you want them to be nice, you don't want to be the person people are nice to because they feel sorry for you. You start to think maybe you're a better person alone. Kathrine is going to have to go home and face up to her husband's tyrannical family. I liked that her life is revealed this slow way, like she is running away from it and when she doesn't have anywhere else to go, no one else to be, it has to come back. That felt true to me. But then she is going to be with the Frenchman, her friend that always had a girlfriend when she didn't have a boyfriend. They are going to live together. They are going to move away from Tromso with the kid. It is going to be a new life someone else could have and I can't see it to feel envy about the little things you could do. And I'm envious of me when I was reading it because it was nice to read about her past when her Sammi father had the job on the Sammi reservation for tourists. I was in her life too and there was something else in my head than just me. Little Kathrine wore authentic gear and people stared. I had found Unformed Landscape when I was looking up books translated by Michael Hofmann (goodreader Lee once wrote he was a foolproof way of discovering great German language authors). I had been wishing I had a book about the Sammi. It was at the time my calming place to look up photos of Sammi houses and watch videos. I want to live in the little house on stilts that look like chicken leg Baba Yaga houses. I couldn't believe I found both in one book. I would want to watch the lives and there little Kathrine was living her life as her father gets paid to show how other people live.A long time ago I read about another book describing it as the hidden interior life of another thing. They didn't feel home here and I thought that was exactly what I wanted. That's what Unformed Landscape is and it is my kind of a book. To breathe and stand in the doorway and then you start to relax and the person is not just going to be nice, they will start to make faces you can recognize and know, you can find a space between you. It's not hidden it's living and you respect it like a living thing. I love to get this from books like this. It's pretty amazing to me you can do it in a book. I forget I'm reading and I'm watching Kathrine's face and I see her quietly wishing for something else. She runs away and then she learns how to read the hidden interior life. If you didn't get that from another person how do you get relief enough from yourself to see what was too close before?
Kathrine, the heroine in UNFORMED LANDSCAPE, is yearning for the end of winter. "In summer, she drew the light into herself, in winter she had the feeling she wasn't alive, just half-alive, and dreaming." On this Saturday in April, when the slight twilight lifts the dark of winter, she is skiing some distance towards the lighthouse, and having left the last landmark of the village behind, she "glides out into the limitless white of the fjeld". The lighthouse keepers always welcome her, but "always told the same stories, talked uninterruptedly, and still they were as silent as the landscape." With short, deceptively uncomplicated, sentences Swiss author Peter Stamm creates an affecting visual rendering of the vast landscape of the north and the simple, yet hard lives of the inhabitants of this most northern region of Norway, far beyond the Arctic Circle. "The borders (between Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway) up here they look all alike. The borders were covered by snow, the snow joined up everything, and the darkness covered it over. The real borders were between day and night, between summer and winter, between the people." It is as much the "borders between summer and winter" as those "between the people" that Stamm explores with great sensitivity and depth in this brief, intense novel.Kathrine, at twenty eight, has been going through life's routines without questioning. She works as a customs inspector at the harbour, boarding, primarily, Russian trawlers that regularly anchor there to unload their fish catch. With one failed marriage behind her and a child, she is marrying again. This time, with Thomas, she may be looking forward to a quieter and better life. Serious and successful in his work, Thomas comes from a wealthy family and he is good to her son. Kathrine should be happy. Yet, she is not and little by little doubts form in her mind about Thomas ideas of married life. "His life represented a bold stroke through the unformed landscape of her life." He is emptying their home from anything that she cares for, memories and, especially, her books. When a letter circulates in the village, written by Thomas' family, that insults and humiliates her, Kathrine leaves the house and, within a few days, the village. She travels south of the Arctic Circle, for the first time in her life, by ship and train all the way to France... Yet, the longer she travels the more she realizes that "[t]hings don't look any different on the other side", the towns there are more crowded, the people don't look any happier. Her initial resigned acceptance that she probably could not really restart her life elsewhere, slowly turns into a new recognition that "home" may be the place where she should rebuild her life. What would it take?At some point, Kathrine realizes that "I am as I am, and that's it. For always". It is not said with resignation, it is the beginning for her to emerge from a darker inner place. In the German original, this thought is captured in its epigraph: "YOU BE LIKE YOU, ever", from a poem by Paul Celan. It is also, more or less directly, the advice Kathrine receives from her only real friends: two older and wiser ships captains and her childhood friend, Morten. They are not only excellent listeners, they are asking questions about her inner self. Nobody else does. With their help, she gradually learns to give some new shape or form to her inner "unformed" landscape.Peter Stamm's story is not unusual nor the events dramatic, we may all know of somebody similar to Kathrine. What makes Stamm's novel different is the way he succeeds in getting into the young woman's mind, how he very gently brings out her gradual emotional growing. He does this in such an understated way that we find ourselves drawn to Kathrine and her story long before we become conscious how deeply she has affected our own thinking.
What do You think about Unformed Landscape (2006)?
The best line of this novel by Peter Stamm concerns the protagonist, Kathrine, and her second marriage to Thomas, a man she did not love. He forms a "bold stroke through the unformed landscape of her life." This short novel (or novella) concerns Kathrine's attempt to discover who she is and what she wants. The style of writing, which seems minimalist or spare, did not appeal to me. I struggled to understand Kathrine's rationales, or to gain enough access to her thoughts to sympathize with her decisions. Seldom could I understand what she felt. Not knowing the color of her hair until half-way through the story, and struggling to picture what she looked like, did not help, either. Nonetheless, I respect Stamm's decision to keep to minimal details and information, thus making this character autonomous, private from not only from those she dislikes and distrusts, but those she does not know--in other words, her readers. I am glad to have read it, but I likely will only remember the story because I am recording this review of it.
—Andrea Broomfield
Sve počinje u malom selu na sjeveroistočnoj obali Norveške. To je granica između Norveške, Švedske, Finske i Rusije koja leži pod snijegom u tami, gdje su granice između dana i noći, ljeti i zimi, vrlo kratke. Kathrine radi u carinarnici za inspekciju ribarskih brodova koji redovito dolaze u luku. Ona je u kasnim 20-tim, ima sina iz prvog braka. Ubrzo je uletila u drugi brak bez ljubavi. Udala se za čovjeka čija je hladna i dominantna konvencionalnost činila hrabar hod kroz bezoblični krajolik njezina života.Nakon što je otkrila tajne o svom mužu i njegove (sitne) laži, ona odlučuje napustiti muža. Putuje u Dansku, zatim i Francusku u posjet poznaniku koji joj je nekoć bio privlačan, a na povratku prolazi kroz Švedsku, nastojeći kroz različita iskustva i susrete izići na kraj s vlastitim strahovima, odnosno utvrditi što želi i osjeća...Ova knjiga ima svega 140 stranice i pročita se u par sati. Priča govori vječito o samoći, krhkosti ljubavi, izgubljenih iluzija i samospoznaja. U ovoj godini meni osobno najbolja knjiga koja me dirnula.
—Natalie
Il y a des livres pour l'été : Bonjour Tristesse", "L'étranger", "Le mépris" .... Des livres qui donnent chaud. "Paysages aléatoires" est un livre pour l'hiver. Un livre qui donne froid.Kathrine vit au nord du cercle polaire, dans un petit port de pêche où il fait nuit la moitié de l'année. Employée des douanes, elle inspecte mollement les bâteaux de passage.Elle a eu un enfant d'un premier mariage.Elle s'est (mal) remariée avec un homme qui se révèle un menteur pathologique, protégé par une famille confite en dévotion.A 28 ans, elle décide de quitter ce monde qui l'étouffe et de partir vers ce Sud qu'elle ne connaît pas.Elle prend le bateau, le train, traverse l'Allemagne, voit la tour Eiffel, puis après avoir partagé le lit d'un Danois croisé quelques mois plus tôt dans sa ville natale, y revient.Si la soudaine célébrité de Joël Dicker l'a éclipsé depuis quelques mois, Peter Stamm reste l'une des valeurs sures de la littérature suisse.La lecture de son deuxième roman, publié en 2001, m'a fait découvrir et aimer cet auteur pudique qui réussit à rendre attachants des personnages ordinaires traversés par de profondes tensions.Il n'y a aucune démagogie dans sa prose dépouillée, aucune concession à l'air du temps. Sa simplicité désabusée ne laisse pas insensible.
—Yves Gounin
