Seven Years (novel)

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Seven Years is a novel by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm . The title alludes to Jacob , the biblical progenitor of the Israelites . Like him, Stamm's protagonist, a young architect named Alexander, stands between two women: his equally beautiful and intelligent colleague Sonja, whom he married and with whom he founded an architecture office, and the Polish woman Iwona, who lives illegally in Germany, to whom he has an inexplicable passion . The novel was published by S. Fischer Verlag in autumn 2009 and made it onto the longlist of the German Book Prize 2009.

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Student bungalows in the Munich Olympic Village

Alexander, Rüdiger and Ferdi are three architecture students who are friends in Munich . On a whim, they speak to a young woman in the beer garden named Iwona, a Polish woman from Poznan who lives in Germany without a residence permit. Although Alexander finds the shy, religious Iwona as unattractive as it is uninteresting, the two of them have an almost wordless, purely sexual affair in which he feels free of all obligations. Even when the student who lives in the Olympic village meets Rüdiger's friend Sonja, he can't help but feel passionate about Iwona. Sonja, who also studies architecture, seems to be the perfect partner for him: beautiful, intelligent, sensible and successful. However, she is inhibited in all tenderness and does not show Alexander the same unconditional devotion as Iwona.

It was only when he married Sonja that Alexander broke off his connection with Iwona. The couple founded a joint architecture office and built a house in Tutzing on Lake Starnberg . Only the unfulfilled desire to have children casts a shadow over the planned marriage. After seven years, a letter asking for money for an operation brings Iwona back into Alexander's life. She still loves the young architect, remained loyal to him all these years while she worked illegally as a cleaning lady and found her spiritual home in Catholic circles. Once again, Alexander feels the same passion for women, with whom he does not seem to have anything to do with, and he begins to humiliate her by financially rewarding her regular pastoral hours. When Iwona becomes pregnant, Alexander thinks the best solution is to adopt the child with his wife Sonja . He convinces both women of his plans. The controlled Sonja is ready to overlook the affairs of her husband. Iwona no longer wants to see her daughter Sophie after the handover and does not seek any contact with the new family.

Panorama of Marseille

Seven years later, the construction crisis had an impact on the architectural office, which had to file for bankruptcy. Sonja takes a job in Marseille , where she once completed an internship during her studies and the future spouses got closer. The abandoned Alexander, who is under the supervision of an insolvency administrator, is becoming increasingly neglected. For the first time he is actively looking for Iwona, who still lives in Munich with her cousin Ewa and who still loves him only. He discovers that Iwona has an album in which she keeps photographs and mementos of him. When he shows up with her one night completely drunk, it is the first full night they spend together, but in the morning Alexander leaves Iwona again without greeting and does not go back to her again. After six months, Sonja returns from Marseille, her parents buy the house in Tutzing out of the bankruptcy estate, and through hard work the couple manages to discharge the architectural office.

Three years later, the painter Antje is the guest of the architect couple who once actively paired them up. Alexander tells her the story of his marriage. He is finally certain that the affair with Iwona is over. But now Sonja Alexander admits that the life she leads does not make her happy and that she wants to part with him in order to move to Marseille. When Alexander accompanies Antje to the airport , the atmosphere arouses wanderlust in him and the longing for a new beginning. It's the same mixture of fear and release that he only got to know in the moments with Iwona in his life.

background

Peter Stamm (2012)

For seven years , Peter Stamm is the fourth and most extensive novel at the time of publication. According to Verena Mayer, the Swiss author “takes a lot of time to illuminate the corners and edges of his main character”, including through the technique of flashbacks . Stamm described his previous novels as chamber pieces that act in a limited period of a few months and in an indefinite present. In Seven Years, however , the development of the characters and their relationships takes a total of eighteen years, and the plot is repeatedly accompanied by references to current events such as the death of Herbert von Karajan , the fall of the wall or the economic crisis.

Stamm named the play Iwona Księżniczka Burgunda by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz from 1935, in which the prince marries the ugliest woman in the empire, who then gains unexpected power over him, as the starting point of the novel . Something similar happens in seven years to the architect Alexander with the Polish woman Iwona, whose name is borrowed from the Burgundy princess. Stamm was particularly interested in the question of what power a person gains over another by loving him. He deliberately set the plot in Munich , a city whose chicery is determined by external appearances, but which, thanks to Catholicism and being embedded in nature, has also retained a dark, unspoilt nature that matches Iwona. The novel is about people “who plan their lives like architects: Everything is perfect, but it's still not true. The big designs always go wrong. You can't put people in order. "

interpretation

Seven years

Lea and Rahel in a watercolor by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1855)

Peter Stamm divided the 18 years of the storyline of the novel into two episodes of seven years, which are told in retrospect from a framework story four years later . In the novel he quotes the biblical model around the progenitor Jacob and his two wives Lea and Rachel . Like him, the architect Alexander has to endure seven years of marriage and abstinence before he can live out his passion with Iwona. And in Alexander's relationship, too, it is the “wrong” woman who becomes pregnant: “But when the LORD saw that Leah was unloved, he made her fertile; But Rahel was sterile. ”( Gen. 29.31  Lut ) For Gerrit Bartels, the child, almost born of an immaculate conception, becomes a savior for the troubled marriage of the architect couple.

Bettina Schulte also draws a biblical comparison to the seven fat and seven lean years that Joseph , Jacob's son, prophesied to the Egyptians, and she asks whether Alexander's time at Sonja's side is now “years of fulfillment or privation, years of happiness or of misfortune ”. Shirin Sojitrawalla, on the other hand, refers to The darn 7th year in which Alexander's passion for Iwona breaks out again. “Seven Years of Solitude” - based on Gabriel García Márquez 's novel Hundred Years of Solitude - is recognized by Josef Bichler, for whom the “seven-year cycle” represents an organizing element in the architect's life story.

architecture

Cité Radieuse in Marseille by Le Corbusier
Quartier Schützenstrasse in Berlin by Aldo Rossi

The dust jacket of the book shows the Cité Radieuse in Marseille, for which Sonja feels a particular fascination. The novel is preceded by a quote from the architect Le Corbusier : "Lights and shadows reveal the forms". For Bettina Schulte, light and shadow stand for the two different women in the novel: Sonja, who stands in the center of a brightly lit room in the opening sentence, and Iwona, who leads a shadowy existence. Sandra Kegel sees the “play of light and shadow” as the construction principle of Seven Years . According to Shirin Sojitrawalla, the building of houses is the central metaphor of the novel, which stands for the marriage of the two architects as well as for Stamm's narrative style, which is reminiscent of Alexander's dreams of transparency and openness, of spaces that generate feelings.

The architectural models Sonjas and Alexander already show the contrasting attitudes towards life of the couple: Sonja adores Le Corbusier's modernity and the functionality of his buildings. Alexander feels drawn to the melancholy and backwardness of Aldo Rossi . While Sonja believes that architecture can change the world, he already sees all great deeds accomplished. It is not love that connects the two spouses, but the common understanding of one's own biography as a project that has to be planned and designed. But life cannot be drawn up on the drawing board, the theoretical plan does not stand up to the stupid demands of practice, as Sonja learns in a dispute with the caretaker of a school she designed, whose only concern is the functionality of the bike racks. In the end, according to Verena Mayer, Alexander becomes the “architect of unhappiness” for the women he meets. Shirin Sojitrawalla speaks of the “insolvency of a marriage” and an “architecture of failure”.

For Martin Ebel, architecture is particularly well suited among all art forms to give people's dreams a visible, real dwelling. But it also makes their failure particularly clear. In this way, Alexander gradually loses everything creative in his career, and in the end his designs are nothing more than self-centered gimmicks that will never be implemented, while his role in real projects is limited to supervising the construction site. For Roman Bucheli, architects are in any case "the domesticated artists who have subjected their drawing art to the right angle and put their imagination into customer service." The architects' counter-model is the painter Antje, who with her young lover has not only withdrawn from social conventions , but who is also the only character in the novel to lead a truly free and self-determined life.

Love triangle

The relationship between Alexander, Sonja and Iwona is classified in most reviews as a triangular relationship . Josef Bichler describes the novel as a "triangular story for readers with an academic background". Petra Schröder sees the classic "adultery genre" as the subject of a novella . Christoph Schröder speaks of a "neo-romantic shiver love story" in the style of Poe or Eichendorff . Gerrit Bartels, on the other hand, describes two parallel love stories. In fact, Alexander himself sees the relationship with Iwona as a parallel world with its own laws. And it almost seems to him that he is not going through the affair himself, but a doppelganger. Iris Radisch speaks of a “double love”, in which two “love concepts” are juxtaposed, which Regula Fuchs brings to the denominator of a logical and an impossible relationship. Hajo Steinert calls it an “experimental arrangement of love”. For Sandra Kegel, it's not just about three interlinked relationships, but rather the struggle “for love and happiness in general”.

Sonja and Iwona, the two women in Alexander's life, are antipodes . For Bettina Schulte they stand for different life plans: Sonja for “the Faustian principle of constant striving for higher things”, Iwona for “the return of the same thing”. Martin Ebel describes the contrast between the "plant and the power woman". Sonja is bursting with dynamism, while Iwona radiates something “vegetative” in her passivity and “entangling penetrance”. Sandra Kegel also emphasizes "Iwona's persistent inactivity - she does nothing, except to love". It is precisely the activism of his wife that drives Alexander to the Polish woman without actually feeling comfortable with her presence. But it leads back to the simple, regulated world of his childhood, in which there is no sense of time and responsibility. For Christoph Schröder, Alexander's relationship with Iwona is a “web of humiliation, self-humiliation” and mutual power over one another.

What Alexander feels for Iwona is not just a "sexual bondage ". It is precisely her submissive love that gives her power over the beloved. For Martin Ebel, Iwona is filled with the love for Alexander "like a gift from God"; it is an almost religious love that even years of waiting cannot affect. A central thesis of Stamm's novel is: "A person who loves has always won, regardless of whether his love is fulfilled or not". It is worse not being able to love than not being loved, which is why Sandra Kegel considers the architect couple to be at least as great victims of history as the self-sacrificing Iwona. Alexander's dependence on Iwona is reflected in two secondary characters, Birgit and Tanja, the two flatmates, who also cannot get away from each other.

The tribe hero

For Gerrit Bartels, Alexander, the architect, is “a typical, sometimes badly mindless, regular hero who lets himself go”. Shirin Sojitrawalla also describes him as a driven person who never has the feeling of acting himself in his relationships. Life happens to him as if it were predetermined without being able to intervene in the process. Martin Ebel sees Alexander overwhelmed and unable to make a decision. While the two women he stands between are both clear and purposeful, he remains vague and ambivalent, paralyzed by his own contradictions. According to Petra Schröder, he wants to keep all options open and accepts that he might hurt other people's feelings. For Hajo Steinert he is in any case a "snob" and " chauvie as he says in the book", and Regula Fuchs feels "disgust at the unbearable protagonist".

Alexander's perspective determines the entire novel. He reports something, but above all how he experienced the eighteen years between Sonja and Iwona. According to Shirin Sojitrawalla, he wants to give an account of his life confession, but without finding out about himself. For Regula Fuchs, the protagonist is under constant pressure to justify himself and tries to give his actions a higher degree of consecration in retrospect. In his perception, his story works like a law of nature. According to Sandra Kegel, for the Stammschen protagonist it becomes a variant of free will to have acted wrongly in full awareness of the consequences. Roman Bucheli, on the other hand, sees the architect cured of an addiction that he still cannot understand how it happened to him. It is the report of a dry alcoholic, "the result of a great disillusionment, and therefore he tells with pathetic sobriety". For Martin Ebel, the undercooled "Peter Stamm tone" fits perfectly with his first-person narrator, and he compares it to a viola "that does without any vibrato ."

According to Petra Schröder, Stamm writes the “chronicle of his generation” in his works. He makes the children of the economic miracle an account of avoided decisions, and the consequences that they lead to. According to Shirin Sojitrawalla, it is the generation to which all options are open, and which cannot decide precisely because every decision also means taking responsibility and enduring both the guilt and the longing for the unlived alternative. Gerrit Bartels sees the dilemma of the 40-year-old generation in the fact that they are stuck between the “illusions of the youth” and the “compromises of the middle years”. In the end, Stamm releases his hero into a future without Sonja and Iwona and, according to Martin Ebel, offers him “a new chance; he then has to seize and use it himself. "

reception

Seven Years was published in the autumn of 2009 as the “top title” by the Frankfurt-based S. Fischer Verlag , which, according to Philip Gut, represents unusual attention for a Swiss writer. The novel reached fourth place on the SWR best list in September and the long list of the German Book Prize 2009. Since its publication, it has been translated into 13 languages.

The novel was largely received positively by the German-language feature articles. For Martin Ebel it was a “diagnosis of the times and a large piece of literature”, but “not only in terms of size the greatest that Peter Stamm has ever produced.” According to Verena Mayer, it was “the longest and most weighty novel” by the Swiss author. Regula Fuchs also saw Seven Years "comparatively lush with its 300 pages", but "literarily tiring in the long run". For Sandra Leis, the novel tended "to be long-winded in the last third", and for Hajo Steinert it had "become much too long", a "slip of this narrator who, as we know from previous books, can actually do better."

Bettina Schulte judged Peter Stamm's work: “This author is not up for simple solutions. Perseverance in the intermediate realm is what makes his literature so great. ”Shirin Sojitrawalla summarized:“ He writes lightly about professional and private failure […] with cool tenderness and empathy. ”According to Gerrit Bartels“ one is inevitably drawn into the maelstrom of this clear, unadorned and yet resilient language drawn in by Stamm ”, and in the end he found the novel“ as relentless as it is entertaining ”. According to Sandra Kegel, the author “comes so oppressively close to the doubts, fears and life lies of his characters that it hurts to read.” For Christoph Schröder, “the most irritating story of a crisis seething beneath the surface” was Peter Stamm's “best work to date”. .

Roman Bucheli acknowledged a “suggestive power” for seven years , but he suggested: “Perhaps this flawlessly crafted and flawlessly written novel here and there an interesting“ error ”in the genetic code of its main character would be good”. Josef Bichler asked critically: "Everyone is at liberty to identify the unexcited, even laconic, in the overly simply knitted fabric, but how much glossy aesthetics can a text withstand in order to maintain its fiction claim?" Iris Radisch described a "sympathetically indecisive and elegiac romance novel" which, however, was “too clear, a bit gazetted and masculine conventional”. In any case, Petra Schröder read a "novel that has an uncanny inkling of what we are made of."

expenditure

Reviews

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Bettina Schulte: Light and Shadow . In: Badische Zeitung from August 15, 2009.
  2. ↑ a b c d Verena Mayer: Architect of misfortune . In: Cicero of October 1, 2009.
  3. ↑ a b A conversation with Peter Stamm ( Memento from October 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) . Interview with Oliver Vogel in a brochure from S. Fischer Verlag (pdf; 644 kB).
  4. ↑ Bettina Schulte: “You can't explain people” . Interview with Peter Stamm. In: Badische Zeitung of September 17, 2011.
  5. ↑ Peter Stamm talks about his book "Seven Years" at the Goethe-Institut Barcelona on Youtube .
  6. ↑ a b c d Roman Bucheli: Scenes from a marriage . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from August 18, 2009.
  7. ↑ a b c d e Gerrit Bartels: How the cleaning lady comes to the child . In: Der Tagesspiegel from August 18, 2009.
  8. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Shirin Sojitrawalla: Life as a project . In: Wiener Zeitung of September 25, 2009.
  9. ↑ a b c Josef Bichler: Seven years of loneliness . In: Der Standard vom 3./4. October 2009.
  10. ↑ a b c d e Petra Schröder: Two women, two life plans . On: Deutschlandradio Kultur from January 10, 2010.
  11. ↑ a b c d e f g Sandra Kegel: Iwona, the beer garden princess . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of August 8, 2009.
  12. ^ A b Sandra Leis: Double life of an architect . In: NZZ am Sonntag of August 30, 2009 (pdf; 2.2 MB).
  13. ↑ a b c d e f Christoph Schröder: The threatening feeling of freedom . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of August 11, 2009.
  14. ↑ a b c d e f g h Martin Ebel: The new trunk is tree-strong . In: Tages-Anzeiger from August 8, 2009.
  15. ↑ a b Iris Radisch: Etude about human mating behavior . In: The time of August 13, 2009.
  16. ↑ a b c d Regula Fuchs: Love and let love . In: Der Bund of August 8, 2009.
  17. ↑ a b c Hajo Steinert: Iwona, pale woman from Poland . In: Die Welt from September 12, 2009.
  18. ↑ Philipp Gut: Mixed feelings . In: The World Week of August 13, 2009.
  19. ↑ SWR best list, September 2009 on the SWR website (pdf; 19 kB).
  20. ↑ Longlist 2009 ( memento of October 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the German Book Prize .
  21. ↑ Seven years on the homepage of Peter Stamm.
  22. ↑ Peter Stamm: Seven years with Perlentaucher .