{"id":306736,"date":"2017-07-31T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2017\/07\/31\/agnes\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:18","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:18","slug":"agnes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2017\/07\/31\/agnes\/","title":{"rendered":"Agnes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The narrator of Peter Stamm\u2019s first novel, Agnes<\/em>, originally published in 1998 and now available in the U.S. in an able translation by Michael Hofmann, is a young Swiss writer who has come to Chicago to research a book on American luxury trains. In the reading room of the Public Library he meets Agnes, a graduate student in Physics. They have little in common. The narrator values his freedom more than his happiness. Agnes is prey to various fears\u2014of windows that don\u2019t open, of air conditioners, of elevators\u2014and locks herself in the bathroom to change. It\u2019s unclear that either likes the other, though each claims to be in love.<\/p>\n

Despite these unpropitious signs, the two embark on a relationship that is aimless until they turn it into a narrative. \u201cWrite a story about me,\u201d Agnes asks the narrator, \u201cso I know what you think of me.\u201d At first both enjoy the challenge she\u2019s set him. But what begins as a flirtatious parlor game soon turns darker. When tragedy strikes, the narrator turns to the story to reverse the past. But eventually he no longer writes their story; the story writes them. <\/p>\n

Agnes is most affected by this turn of events. Having already expressed her difficulty with reading\u2014\u201cIt feels to me as though I\u2019ve become the character in it, and the character\u2019s life ends when the books does . . . I didn\u2019t want books to have me in their power\u201d\u2014she now becomes one with her character in the fiction within the fiction, leading to an ambiguous ending in which the end of Stamm\u2019s novel mirrors the end of his narrator\u2019s tale. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear the novel\u2019s most important relationship is not between the characters, but between fiction and reality. But it\u2019s equally unclear what the nature of that relationship is supposed to be, especially because the novel regularly teases us with metaphors that promise but fail to tell us how to understand it. <\/p>\n

At one point, for example, Agnes explains her research into the atomic structure of crystals in terms that seem to offer a key to understanding the narrative: \u201cAlmost everything is symmetrical at some level,\u201d she tells the narrator, before adding, \u201cit\u2019s asymmetry that makes life possible. The difference between the sexes. The fact that time goes in one direction.\u201d This claim chimes with the narrator\u2019s belief that \u201clife doesn\u2019t go for endings, it goes on.\u201d Does Agnes<\/em> adhere to these ideas about form? Is the way the story and the story within the story are symmetrical a sign of its impossibility, to use Agnes\u2019s term? In offering an ending that loops around to the beginning, is the novel mimicking the narrator\u2019s idea of life, which doesn\u2019t go for endings, or only emphasizing how different narratives are from life? <\/p>\n

Similar questions arise when, in the course of his research, the narrator studies the Pullman Strike of 1894, interpreting it not in political or economic terms, but as a reaction by workers against \u201cthe complete control of their lives by their employer,\u201d who \u201chad planned for every contingency, except his workers\u2019 desire for freedom.\u201d We could read the narrator\u2019s criticism of the patriarchal industrialist as an unintentional self-critique of his attitude to Agnes. Or we could understand it as a way to describe the author\u2019s relationship to his characters and his work. But in what way does this carefully controlled novel allow for anything like its characters\u2019 freedom?<\/p>\n

The effect of these allegories for our reading\u2014at once so overt and so enigmatic\u2014is destabilizing, as if Stamm were proposing, through the very superfluity of these possible keys to understanding the text, the very failure of interpretation. Just as we are desperate for the control over life\u2019s contingencies promised by narrative, so too, Stamm teasingly suggests, we are similarly insistent, as readers of those narratives, on making sense of them. At its most interesting, Agnes<\/em> hints that its readers might be as domineering as its narrator. But Stamm never explains what it would mean to let Agnes, or Agnes<\/em>, be free. How can we read without interpreting? And why must the possibility that a text could exceed interpretation be offered through the clich\u00e9d and misogynistic idea of woman as enigma? <\/p>\n

Ultimately, Stamm\u2019s metafictional sleights of hand are more tiresome than vertiginous. Agnes<\/em> has neither the balance between possibility and aimlessness of Stamm\u2019s early short stories about young people adrift, published in English as In Strange Gardens and Other Stories<\/em>, nor the emotional impact of the two more recent collections combined in We\u2019re Flying<\/em>. Its concerns are as airless as the narrator\u2019s climate-controlled apartment that Agnes, and ultimately readers, longs to escape. Agnes<\/em> offers a writer whose cleverness hadn\u2019t yet been enriched by compassion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The narrator of Peter Stamm\u2019s first novel, Agnes, originally published in 1998 and now available in the U.S. in an able translation by Michael Hofmann, is a young Swiss writer who has come to Chicago to research a book on American luxury trains. In the reading room of the Public Library he meets Agnes, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[66346,66336,5706,10626,1906,46016],"class_list":["post-306736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-agnes","tag-dorian-stuber","tag-german-literature","tag-michael-hofmann","tag-other-press","tag-peter-stamm"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306736","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\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":332376,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306736\/revisions\/332376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}