Disruption

To the Back of Beyond by Peter Stamm

So many great novels begin in disruption, with a sudden breach or fracture in what are otherwise equable, often commonplace lives. One day Tolstoy’s respectable Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky is discovered by his wife to be having an affair with their French governess; Thomas Bernhard’s captious intellectual hero, Franz-Josef Marau, receives a telegram one afternoon, informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car accident, so that he is compelled to return home from his exile in Rome to the dreaded family estate of Wolfsegg; Nadine Gordimer’s Maureen Smales, a white middle class liberal in apartheid South Africa, is forced one night to flee her comfortable home under the protection of her black servant, July, in order to escape the revolution that is fast destroying her world; Ian McEwan’s Henry Perowne, involved one day in a minor car accident in London, finds himself helplessly ensnared in a confrontation with a mentally disturbed man named Baxter; Toni Morrison’s runaway slave, Sethe, living safely in the free state of Ohio at the novel’s start, is haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter, Beloved; and Franz Kafka’s innocuous, finally anonymous bank teller, Joseph K., is arrested one fine morning without having done anything wrong. 

Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s novel To the Back of Beyond begins much this same way. As described on the flyleaf: “Happily married with two children and a comfortable home in a Swiss town, Thomas and Astrid enjoy a glass of wine in their garden on a night like any other. Called back to the house by their son’s cries, Astrid goes inside, expecting her husband to join her in a bit. But Thomas gets up and, after a brief moment of hesitation, opens the gate and walks out.”

Alternating between Thomas’ and Astrid’s perspectives, what follows is a gently philosophical, at points bewitchingly opaque novel about a middle-class couple adrift in the contemporary world. Beautifully translated by Michael Hofmann, the final pages virtually shimmer with light. 

 

Peter Adam Nash