Overstaying
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force.
“I don't see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,” writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave.
When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Swiss writer Koch's bewitching debut, a woman's isolated existence is upended by the arrival of a strange being. The unnamed narrator lives alone in the small mountain village where she grew up. One fateful day, she locks eyes with "the visitor" on a train platform. The newcomer is only glancingly described: he has claws, wears a poncho, and his hair juts out "in hedgehog fashion." She invites him home, and for a while, the two fall into a comfortable domestic rhythm despite not speaking the same language ("One thing I liked about the visitor was that I never knew if he could actually understand me"). Eventually, however, the narrator wonders whether the visitor will ever leave, and questions whether she truly accepts his presence. Told in swirling, disorienting fragments, the narration is sometimes funny ("I've never said I'm proud of how wicked I am. And yet I must admit I've come to terms with it relatively quickly"), sometimes lightly ominous ("During the night, once the visitor falls into his nightmarish sleep, I will measure the width of his bite"), and consistently sharp. Fans of dreamy and mysterious fiction like Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond will devour this.
