Seven Years - Softcover

Peter Stamm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847085105 ISBN 13: 9781847085108

Publisher: Granta, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Stamm was born in 1963 and now lives in Winterthur, Switzerland. His prize-winning books have been translated into twenty languages.

Review:

""Seven Years" is a novel to make you doubt your own dogma. What more can a novel do than that?" --Zadie Smith, "Harper's Magazine" "Stamm's talent is palpable, but what makes him a writer to read, and read often, is the way he renders contemporary life as a series of ruptures. Never entirely sure of their position, his characters engage in a constant effort to establish their equilibrium." --"New York Times Book Review" "Stamm's cleverness is to align a spareness that works in translation with his characters' instinctive fear of all things rich and intense. Lean as it is, his prose is wonderfully 'literary' in its fine integration of voice and story. The constant disorientation of his characters, their sense that their lives are interchangeable with any number of other lives, seem peculiarly suited to this era of globalization." --"The New York Review of Books" "With a patient and impressive commitment to realism, this Swiss novel follows the course of a complicated, troubled marriage...Though Stamm pulls off a quietly spectacular plot twist halfway through the book, he never loses sight of the quotidian things that erode or transform relationships over time: an oddly personal disagreement about the merits of 'Rain Man', or the 'piles of romance novels, Christian manuals, and Polish magazines' that crowd a lover's apartment."--"The New Yorker"" ""Stamm is a master of quietly deliberative stories. In "Seven Years," as in the best of his work, he puts often simple-seeming character through extraordinary paces, all the more remarkable given the Carver-like restraint he exercises in his writing." --"Bookforum" ""Seven Years" is a powerful, enlightening novel about the eternal search for contentment in life, the often fickle nature of love, and the knowledge that in reality, happiness is rarely how we dreamed it would be." --"The Daily Beast" "Here is Stamm's strength, in a good English translation, the clean uncluttered senten

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1847085105
• ISBN 13: 9781847085108
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272