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TO THE BACK OF BEYOND

Name: TO THE BACK OF BEYOND
Author: Peter Stamm
ISBN: 978-1-59051-828-1

by Peter Stamm ; translated by Michael Hofmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2017

In this densely detailed, largely opaque book, the novelist leaves his readers as unmoored as his characters.

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A man abandons his family for no discernible reason.

In the latest from Swiss novelist Stamm (Agnes, 2016), Thomas and Astrid are relaxing outside their house shortly after returning from vacation. One of their two children cries out, and one of them must go see what’s the matter. She goes and stays inside. Without premeditation, he waits and then starts walking. And keeps walking. With no chapter divisions, the narrative alternates between the two of them after he leaves, generally around four pages for each, describing what he does and how she feels. It is plain that both of them had been operating on autopilot, doing and saying the same things day after day for years on end. Maybe this was the problem. Maybe this is the human condition. In a rare moment of reflection, Thomas ponders the routine that had been his life, “the faith, the conviction that it was the right thing to do. He too had once formed part of this quiet consensus, he had functioned in the way that was expected of him, without it ever having been discussed.” Now, on impulse, he has freed himself from that consensus in order to walk wherever for however long. Astrid also feels some freedom, along with various other emotions associated with stages of denial and acceptance. She doesn’t quite feel that he is gone, because so much of her own routine remains unchanged. In fact, she felt like she “was making herself Thomas’s accomplice...as though she was joined with him in some secret conspiracy.” She covers for him with the kids and at his work, waiting for him to return, wondering if he will, wondering why he left. They had never argued. Maybe that was the problem. It would seem that there are only two ways that the novel can resolve itself, that either Thomas will return or he won’t, but a Stamm parable is never so cut and dried. Toward the end, “the years had no particular chronology, the journeys no direction, the places stood in no discernible relation to one another.”

In this densely detailed, largely opaque book, the novelist leaves his readers as unmoored as his characters.

Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-59051-828-1

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ARCHIVE OF FEELINGS
by Peter Stamm ; translated by Michael Hofmann

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SWEET INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD
by Peter Stamm ; translated by Michael Hofmann

- BOOK REVIEW
AGNES
by Peter Stamm ; translated by Michael Hofmann

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.