|
Peter Stamm
Agnes
Arche Verlag, 1998. 153pp. 'Agnes is dead. She was killed by a story.' Such is the stark opening of this exceptionally gripping short novel, which can be read at one sitting, and often, one may guess, will be. The scene is Chicago. The narrator is Swiss, a writer who has abandoned his creative talent after one volume of short stories and now turns out pot-boilers on such subjects as the history of the bicycle, or luxury railway coaches. The Agnes of the title is an intense, lonely girl, with a part-time assistantship in the university's mathematics department where she is writing a thesis on crystal lattices. She is twenty-five, the narrator nearer forty. After starting a relationship with him and moving into his apartment she finds herself pregnant - a situation to which he responds with extreme callousness. She leaves, has a miscarriage, then returns - but not for long. Soon she is lying dead in the snow, and the narrator is facing his responsibility for this tragedy, not for the usual conventional reasons but because he has been writing a story about their love affair, at the end of which he has secretly predicted her death. The twist in the tale is the extent to which the story which the narrator is writing about the affair takes control of their lives. When he has reached the present he begins to imagine the future. But now ominous ideas that he has never consciously conceived start to force their way in. It (the story) is dictating to them. Agnes is at first flattered to be at the centre of a story, then increasingly afraid. Her lover, returning from a New Year's Eve party at which he has almost certainly made love to somebody else, is too self-centred even to suspect the truth - that she has found and read the new ending and followed it through. Among this book's many virtues is its gradual revelation of character. Agnes, who has once described death by freezing as 'beautiful', is particularly well-defined. The style is unpretentious, the tension maintained throughout. A remarkable achievement.
|
