Seven Years
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
Alex is caught between two very different women. Sonia, his wife, is intelligent, beautiful, charming and ambitious and together they have established a successful architectural firm and a life of easy luxury. But in the background is Ivona, who is dull, plain and passive. The only thing she offers Alex is her love, unconditionally, which inspires in him a queasy mixture of repulsion and passion. Alex knows he must make a choice, but when Ivona becomes pregnant, life takes an unexpected turn which leaves him more puzzled than ever by the mysteries of desire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swiss author Stamm (Agnes) examines the complications of love and attraction in this captivating novel. Alex and his gorgeous and brilliant wife, Sonia, run an architecture firm and have a lovely daughter. It is the life he always thought he deserved, but during the fateful seventh year of marriage Alex scratches a familiar itch with Ivona, an old flame who is so tremendously plain and boring that Alex considers himself too good for her, and yet, for reasons inexplicable, his attraction to her runs hotter than it ever has for Sonia. His revulsion toward Ivona's fundamental underwhelmingness gets a lengthy at times, tediously so examination, as does the magnetism that pulls him to her and his own fiery self-hatred. Ego, passion, and deception run wild, but the novel's strength is found in the characters Stamm has created: powerfully imperfect, sometimes despicable, horribly conflicted, and always believable far beyond the archetypes that too often pop up in novels of marital ennui.