{"id":291646,"date":"2012-09-14T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/09\/14\/were-flying\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:04:21","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:04:21","slug":"were-flying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/09\/14\/were-flying\/","title":{"rendered":"We're Flying"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his new collection We\u2019re Flying<\/em>, Swiss author Peter Stamm weaves together a multitude of perspectives with the ghostly fiber of loss. This fascinating set of short stories centers around the general theme of the \u201chuman condition\u201d—joy and sadness, birth and death, couples and families, work and school. However, a generous majority of these tales unfold against a subconscious background of grief, whether real or imagined: the widow that learns posthumously of her husband\u2019s affair; the toddler abandoned by his parents at preschool; the frustrated artist. Yet the book isn\u2019t a blurred mess of sympathy; rather, it\u2019s a sharp analysis of life\u2019s chronic pain and beauty. Precise, disquieting, and high-impact, Stamm\u2019s new collection slices away surface tissue to reveal the downright messiness of human life<\/p>\n

Stamm\u2019s stories are surprisingly fleshed-out with minimum verbage. Like the artist in one of his stories, Stamm writes surgically: \u201cYou paint what you see with the maximum of precision, but you don\u2019t care about the precision of the depiction . . . What counts is decisiveness.\u201d His characters are quickly but sharply sketched; his story-world is modeled on the one at hand, but as though seen through a microscope, with fine-grained crystals of detail. Stamm shows, instead of tells—in \u201cSweet Dreams,\u201d a newly-cohabiting girl reflects on the meaning of family while imagining an old black-and-white photo of relatives: <\/p>\n

\n

Lara could see the pictures, big family get-togethers in a garden in the north of Italy, pictures full of people she didn\u2019t know, even her mother didn\u2019t know some of the names. Thereafter the family had fallen apart . . . When Lara had visited Italy with her parents, there hadn\u2019t been any more big reunions, only visits in darkened homes with old people who smelled funny and served dry cookies and big plastic bottles of lukewarm Fanta.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Rather than directly stating Lara\u2019s isolation in her new romance, Stamm instead gives us vivid objects<\/em> to evoke the feeling: a faded photograph. Dry cookies and lukewarm Fanta. Old people whose homes are lonely and \u201cfunny\u201d-smelling. Later on, we get \u201ca barely used coffee machine that Laura found on eBay, a chest for their shoes, a whole stack of yellow bath towels that were on offer\u201d—objects that carry a false connotation of stability, but which are really as destructible and transient as her new relationship.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an uncanny equanimity and composure in Stamm\u2019s voice as he makes us privy to frequent scenes of psychological pain. When Angelika brings home a forgotten child from her daycare job, her boyfriend Benno is both warm and insensitive: he plays with the child, making droning noises like an airplane—\u201cWe\u2019re flying!\u201d he yells—but later begins to unbutton her blouse in front of the boy. \u201cI\u2019m not going to let that runt spoil my fun,\u201d he snarls, engrossed in a cop show. After the boy\u2019s parents come to pick him up, Angelika is confronted with the reality of Benno\u2019s revealed selfishness and lack of care. \u201cShe freed herself and said she would have a quick shower too. She locked the bathroom but didn\u2019t undress. When Benno knocked on the door, she was still sitting on the toilet, with her face in her hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heavy, shocking endings like these cap off many of Stamm\u2019s stories, but not all of them are as tragic. In \u201cSeven Sleepers,\u201d a lonely vegetable farmer finds his first love; in \u201cThe Suitcase,\u201d an elderly man surreptitiously slips a suitcase beneath his dying wife\u2019s hospital bed with her necessary items—and a bar of chocolate.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re Flying<\/em> is eerily readable—perhaps due to how much of ourselves we recognize in his characters. In a varied and colorful array of stories, Stamm manages to portray human life as the emotional mishmash that it really is, full of misery and beauty, full of falling and<\/em> flying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his new collection We\u2019re Flying, Swiss author Peter Stamm weaves together a multitude of perspectives with the ghostly fiber of loss. This fascinating set of short stories centers around the general theme of the \u201chuman condition\u201d—joy and sadness, birth and death, couples and families, work and school. However, a generous majority of these tales […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[5706,10626,1906,46016,47426,25766,48556],"class_list":["post-291646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-german-literature","tag-michael-hofmann","tag-other-press","tag-peter-stamm","tag-quantum-sarah","tag-swiss-literature","tag-were-flying"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340656,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291646\/revisions\/340656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}