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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

Peter Stamm’s international reputation as a writer of acute psychological perception and meticulously precise prose has been growing steadily since his first novel, Agnes, was translated into English by Michael Hofmann and published in 2000 When I try to describe Stamm’s writing to those who have yet to encounter it, it is easy to revert to the words oft-used by reviewers of his work: ‘spare’, ‘clean’, ‘crystalline’, even ‘forensic’ The blurb of one of his novels calls him ‘the master of unadorned prose’ But there are vast depths beneath this cool, clear surface As Toby Litt wrote of Stamm’s novel Seven Years in the Guardian, his prose is ‘booby-trapped throughout, with devastations waiting to happen’   Always existential, often beginning with a life-changing event – such as the disappearance of the narrator’s girlfriend in Agnes, or the car crash that kills a woman’s husband and leaves her disfigured in All Days Are Night – Stamm explores in his fiction the nuances of identity, self-perception, and the ways in which his characters interact with the world and other people His novels and stories are deeply psychological, exploring human behaviour and the dark underside of the psyche He is interested in aftermath, and he is unafraid of difficult emotions – guilt, shame and regret are themes to which he often returns Many of his characters are haunted by past mistakes and missed opportunities; some desire people they can’t have, others reject lovers or are themselves rejected Seven Years – my favourite of his novels – tells the story of a handsome man, Alex, and his beautiful wife, Sonia, but also a ‘repulsive’ woman, Ivona, with whom Alex has an affair Things happen to people in Stamm’s fiction, and witnessing the uncomfortable, darkly funny, often tragic fallout unfold is one of the main pleasures of reading his work   Stamm was born in Weinfelden, Switzerland, in 1963 After leaving school he trained as an accountant, and then studied for a few years Psychology, Psychopathology and Literature (and worked for a time in a psychiatric clinic) before becoming a full-time writer As well as novels and short stories, he

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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fiction

Issue No. 3

Forkhead Box

Jeremy M. Davies

fiction

Issue No. 3

What interests me most is that Schaumann, the state executioner, bred mice. In his spare time. Sirens, ozone, exhaust...

feature

Issue No. 11

Literature in a Distracted Era

Adam Thirlwell

feature

Issue No. 11

There are two categories in the literary system I’d like to celebrate at high speed: the lonely writer, and...

Art

November 2013

The Past is a Foreign Country

Natasha Hoare

Art

November 2013

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ The immortal first line to L. P. Hartley’s...

 

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