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Unformed Landscape
Unformed Landscape begins in a small village on a fjord in the Finnmark, on the northeastern coast of Norway, where the borders between Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia lie covered in snow and darkness, where the real borders are between day and night, summer and winter, and between people. Here, a sensitive young woman like Kathrine finds few outlets for her desires. Half Norwegian, half Sami (an indigenous people), Kathrine works for the customs office inspecting the fishing boats arriving regularly in the harbor. She is in her late 20s, has a son from an early marriage, and has drifted into a second loveless marriage to a man whose cold and dominating conventionality forms a bold stroke through the unformed landscape of her life. After she makes a discovery about her husband that deeply wounds her, Kathrine cuts loose from her moorings and her confusion and sets off in search of herself.
Her journey begins aboard a ship headed south, taking her below the Arctic Circle for the first time in her life. Kathrine makes her way to France and has the bittersweet experience of a love affair that flares and dies quickly, her starved senses rewarded by the shimmering beauty of Paris. Through a series of poignant encounters, Kathrine is led to the richer life she was meant to have and is brave enough to claim.
Using simple words strung together in a melodic alphabet, Peter Stamm introduces us, through a series of intimate sketches, to the heart of an unforgettable woman. Her story speaks eloquently about solitude, the fragility of love, lost illusions, and self-discovery.
Her journey begins aboard a ship headed south, taking her below the Arctic Circle for the first time in her life. Kathrine makes her way to France and has the bittersweet experience of a love affair that flares and dies quickly, her starved senses rewarded by the shimmering beauty of Paris. Through a series of poignant encounters, Kathrine is led to the richer life she was meant to have and is brave enough to claim.
Using simple words strung together in a melodic alphabet, Peter Stamm introduces us, through a series of intimate sketches, to the heart of an unforgettable woman. Her story speaks eloquently about solitude, the fragility of love, lost illusions, and self-discovery.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
12 people are currently reading
453 people want to read
About the author
Peter Stamm
63 books358 followersPeter Stamm grew up in Weinfelden in the canton of Thurgau the son of an accountant. After completing primary and secondary school he spent three years as an apprentice accountant and then 5 as an accountant. He then chose to go back to school at the University of Zurich taking courses in a variety of fields including English studies, Business informatics, Psychology, and Psychopathology. During this time he also worked as an intern at a psychiatric clinic. After living for a time in New York, Paris, and Scandinavia he settled down in 1990 as a writer and freelance journalist in Zurich. He wrote articles for, among others, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Tages-Anzeiger, Die Weltwoche, and the satirical newspaper Nebelspalter. Since 1997 he has belonged to the editorial staff of the quarterly literary magazine "Entwürfe für Literatur." He lives in Winterthur.
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May 23, 2013
Whether you continued to try and swim. The brief moment when you went down, before you suffocated. When you stopped struggling for breath, stopped thrashing about with your arms. The instant in which he'd given up, and maybe swam a couple more strokes, not to get to the surface, there was no point, and he knew it. A couple of strokes. And the calm, the quiet under the water. The fact that the last moment is supposed to be happy.
I read Peter Stamm's Unformed Landscape earlier this year. I've wished that it was the day that I read that book many times since. The day would have to end again and I would wish that it could be when I was curled up in the chair in the public library reading room with my book. It is probably one of my favorite books I've read in 2013, despite the missing stars. The four stars is the ending that shuts off. It is the meeting someone and you hope you can be quiet and breathe together but then time inches by and they never call you and the voice in your head starts up again to say they turned into everyone else you felt dumb around. I don't know if it is another direction. I don't want to say it is the too loose endings tied up in a neat bow kind of ending. If someone steps out from you were under my nose and I couldn't smell the good right in front of me is an easy ending and I'm too bitter to accept it I don't want to admit that just yet. Kathrine and her could be something more friend turns into something more and they are a family. It's not too happy that I can't believe it. My nose doesn't freeze to the cold glass of a warm room far away, not quite. But it ends and I have not caught up. It had fit this place inside of me and it was water. It moved on without me and a life will take place without me.
Everything was bigger and noisier, there were more people around, more cars on the streets. But she had hardly seen anything that she hadn't seen at home or in Tromso. There's not a lot of room in a person, she thought.
Kathrine runs away from her Finnmark village of Tromso. She was a custom's officer. She looked into cargo holds of ships and she drank cheap coffee. She still lived in the same town as her ex-husband, the father of her son Randy (named after a country singer he liked. My guess is Randy Travis. I am surprised that Randy would be on the register of legal names. Of course, the author is Swiss and he didn't know or maybe I'm mistaken about Norway having the same laws as Sweden. Randy is distracting, anyway. I imagined the Randys I have known and they were not little Nordic boys). She was still living in her old apartment that is moved into without her when her new husband slowly removes traces of all Kathrine's personality. Good-bye to her American paperback thrillers and ugly furniture. They are moved into his upper class parent's home without her word of protest or consent. Her son is moved into their life, his son now, their grandchild. She could be standing in the doorway of their don't touch anything nice home. Nothing to do with her hands and nothing to do with her expressions. Kathrine doesn't touch anything. Kathrine takes all of the money she has in the bank and runs away.
She doesn't see the sky on her journey to Paris. She sits in stations and on buses and sleeps with the shades drawn from daylight. I know that it was funny-sad and more sad than funny that when she does to Paris she sees a fish factory that looks exactly like the fish factory she managed to escape (most don't). She goes to Paris to see the Danish Christian (a fine Christian name) she met when he worked for the fish factory in Tromso. He sets up her email account. They write for a little while. They stop writing and she gets married. He never tried to kiss her. Kathrine meets people, she meets men. There is attraction there in the nothing to do with your hands and expression. A placeholder. One tour guide on a ship takes her to his home. He sits on the floor outside the bathroom. He will tell his wife about her. The half Sammi Kathrine is exotic and I feel numb to attraction between characters in books most times. I cannot see the desire in their eyes. This background noise of man-woman goes by like the view on a train for me. It would be sad that she goes all of this way to see Christian. That she stands in the doorway first in his home and his mother gives her the what are you doing here look. Is it because she is exotic? I could shrivel in that what are you doing here look. I run away with her. I don't care that Christian isn't really going to be there when she pushes for something to do, to sleep together. There's no connection.
I loved it when Kathrine watches the people doing the little life things and images what it would be like to be them, to be French, to do their things. It isn't different, really. You could do those things. I always know I can do those things too and it is still my favorite thing to do to go somewhere else and feel such envy of strangers. Fruit sellers, two girls in a library picking out music. I felt such envy for this bus driver in Bilbao. I mapped out where he was going and how lucky he was to live somewhere else that I didn't live, to be someone that wasn't me. When Kathrine counts out her change on the bus station table and reads her American thrillers (I don't enjoy these kinds of books at all) I could be watching her too and feel that envy. I was so happy when Kathrine finally got to join the stupid polar bear club the men in her life never let her join. She gets a post card and some dumb coin. I want to join the polar bear club. I wanted to drink coffee with her Russian sea captain friend from her customs job in Finnmark.
But what about the son she doesn't know she loves because she didn't think about what it would feel like to lose him? The son she considers more her cold husband's son? The husband who lied to her about everything all along and she follows him to find he has been sitting in one of those fishing shacks to play cards instead of running. Kathrine lets go and they catch up to her like the image on the web cam focused on her village. Images caught in seconds freeze frame and across the street. It must be always cold and dark from that view and you have to go inside to be warm and not think about things. I would miss the sun and it is funny-sad that Kathrine doesn't see the sun when she runs away. What does she see that she didn't already see at home? I wouldn't want to go home either. I would want to do the things I could do as someone else doing them. It is different that way, less you alone. I loved it when her money almost runs out she is temporarily reprieved when she meets these traveling Swedish girls. The awkward imposing on their temporarily friendly company. Stay with us, we'll pay, it doesn't matter you don't have any money. The Nordic men like you better. You don't have any money. Sit on the bed and feel miserable. Listen to their easy laughter together. The one girl is nice. It feels so precarious, you want them to be nice, you don't want to be the person people are nice to because they feel sorry for you. You start to think maybe you're a better person alone. Kathrine is going to have to go home and face up to her husband's tyrannical family. I liked that her life is revealed this slow way, like she is running away from it and when she doesn't have anywhere else to go, no one else to be, it has to come back. That felt true to me. But then she is going to be with the Frenchman, her friend that always had a girlfriend when she didn't have a boyfriend. They are going to live together. They are going to move away from Tromso with the kid. It is going to be a new life someone else could have and I can't see it to feel envy about the little things you could do. And I'm envious of me when I was reading it because it was nice to read about her past when her Sammi father had the job on the Sammi reservation for tourists. I was in her life too and there was something else in my head than just me. Little Kathrine wore authentic gear and people stared. I had found Unformed Landscape when I was looking up books translated by Michael Hofmann (goodreader Lee once wrote he was a foolproof way of discovering great German language authors). I had been wishing I had a book about the Sammi. It was at the time my calming place to look up photos of Sammi houses and watch videos. I want to live in the little house on stilts that look like chicken leg Baba Yaga houses. I couldn't believe I found both in one book. I would want to watch the lives and there little Kathrine was living her life as her father gets paid to show how other people live.
A long time ago I read about another book describing it as the hidden interior life of another thing. They didn't feel home here and I thought that was exactly what I wanted. That's what Unformed Landscape is and it is my kind of a book. To breathe and stand in the doorway and then you start to relax and the person is not just going to be nice, they will start to make faces you can recognize and know, you can find a space between you. It's not hidden it's living and you respect it like a living thing. I love to get this from books like this. It's pretty amazing to me you can do it in a book. I forget I'm reading and I'm watching Kathrine's face and I see her quietly wishing for something else. She runs away and then she learns how to read the hidden interior life. If you didn't get that from another person how do you get relief enough from yourself to see what was too close before?
January 2, 2023
The themes in this novel by Peter Stamm are familiar. Loneliness, impossibility of lasting meaningful connections with others, absurdity of human existence, illusory and ultimately futile attempts to escape. Yet in all this apparent hopelessness, there are some choices that are still better than others. One could refuse to pretend, one could choose not to lie and not to accept being lied to, one could avoid building a make-belief fanciful facade of 'proper' life that hides the emptiness and darkness within, one could attempt to be honest first and foremost with oneself. This is probably the most directly Camus-esque of Peter Stamm's novels, the one where he does not yet venture beyond the unformed landscape sketched out by the great existentialist.
August 10, 2018
Above the Arctic Circle
The landscape of the title, in the far North of Norway, is not the true subject of this bracingly sparse novella, which is more devoted to the inner landscape of the heart. Peter Stamm's setting is landscape as a state of mind:
The fjeld looked like a drawing made of a few scribbled lines. Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, up here they all looked alike. The borders were covered by snow, the snow joined everything up, and the darkness covered it over. The real borders were between day and night, between summer and winter, between the people.Kathrine is a woman in her twenties, half Norwegian, half Sami (Lapp), who works as a customs inspector on this remote coast. Stamm describes her past history and her present life in this vast but abbreviated landscape in equally terse language:
Kathrine had married Helge, she had had a child, she had divorced Helge. She went to the lighthouse, she stayed there overnight, and she came back the next day.Her life is centered around her small village, the fish packing factory, the Fishermen's Refuge, the Elvekrog village bar, and the church, not that Kathrine has much time for that. She does her job, leaving the child with her mother. She sees a few male friends. She will get married again without fanfare, but this marriage will turn out no better than the first. She has never ventured below the Arctic Circle.
Until one day she takes the Hurtigruten coastal steamer and heads South. It is a journey of self-discovery, and she sees places that she had only read about. More importantly, she sees herself in those places, the same self, but different too. The reader has already learned not to expect epiphany from this novella; its transformations are internal and almost invisible, but real nonetheless. The last lines of the book are as dry as the opening, but they hint at renaissance:
It was fall, then winter. It was summer. It got dark, and then it got light again.The New Yorker review printed on the cover compares Stamm to a Northern internet-age Camus. It is a just comparison in the clarity of his writing and surgical objectivity. But there is no alienation. As he has shown in his most recent novel, Seven Years, Stamm is a master at showing those changes in the heart that take place beneath the surface, tottering steps towards self-realization. He creates characters for whom we care. I liked Seven Years, but simply loved this novella, ten years earlier and a good deal shorter. There is nothing to set the blood coursing so well as a bracing cold shower!
July 28, 2023
I read this in French but an English version of this review follows.
Merci à Vlad:
: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3558313326?
book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
C’est le cercle arctique. Le pays est sans doute aléatoire, mais c’est ce qui forme les habitants. Leur vie, les trois-quarts passées dans la nuit arctique, conforme à la nécessité. Où y en est l’espoir ? Comment y est l’amour ?
Le village n’a pas le temps de croire en Dieu, peut-être même pas le pasteur, homme sympa qui fait gentiment son métier. Pourtant il y en a qui sont croyants (la famille du mari de Kathrine), et leur certitude, leur cruauté systématique, sont opposées à l’apathie, la mollesse, en sorte, de la jeune femme, errant dans sa vie comme dans la grande obscurité du pays en hiver.
Elle semble incapable de s’aider, de sortir des situations créées de sa propre apathie, ou de son sens de son insuffisance. Deux mariages faillis. Liaisons brèves avec des hommes qu’elle ne connaît guère. Incapacité absolue de trouver un chemin qu’elle puisse sentir, adopter. Les choses glissent de pire en pire ; elle s’y enfond presque volontairement.
Elle a un enfant, duquel elle semble s’éloigner de plus en plus, même jusqu’au point où elle le considère comme fils de son deuxième mari, pas « le sien » . Le père de Kathrine est mort ; et sa mère ? Pourquoi ne questionne-t-elle jamais sa fille ? Est-ce qu’elle est faite du même matériel ? Elle ne s’attend pas même aux explications lorsqu’ elle doit prendre de plus en plus la responsabilité pour son petit-fils.
Kathrine fuit sa propre vie. Jusqu’à là elle n’est jamais sortie du cercle arctique. Mais elle voyage comme dans un rêve. En passant par Paris, elle ne sort même pas du métro ; elle erre, parmi les halles et les vitrines des beaux magasins souterrains et s’achète un flacon de parfum cher, marqué « Poison ». Encore de pays aléatoires.
Et Christian, qui ne l’a jamais même embrassée ? Elle le cherche, sachant qu’il ne veut pas d’elle, son cœur abruti se fixant sur lui. Au fond de son être, bat l’aile faible d’un espoir san nom.
C’est alors que tout commence à changer pour Kathrine, presque insensiblement ; elle commence à voir et à écouter, à elle-même autant qu’aux autres, et le chemin vers une vérité viable ne se distingue qu’à travers le pays du mensonge.
Car c’est quoi, le mensonge ? A quoi sert-il ? Pourquoi, toujours, le mensonge ? C’est Harold, capitaine du bateau en Norvège, qui lui pose la question :
« Que crois-tu qu’on verrait si on coupait un homme en morceaux ? »
Il n’en resterait pas grand ’chose.
Beau livre, facilement lu et délicatement achevé.
This is the Arctic Circle. The country may be formless, but it is what shapes the inhabitants. Their life, three-quarters of which is spent in the arctic night, conforms to necessity. Where is hope? What about love?
The village does not have time to believe in God, not even the pastor, a nice man who does his job, kindly. Yet there are those who are religious (the family of Kathrine's husband), and their certainty, their systematic cruelty, are opposed to the apathy, the softness, so to speak, of the young woman, wandering in her life as in the great darkness of the country in winter.
She seems unable to help herself, to get out of situations created by her own apathy, or her sense of inadequacy. Two failed marriages. Brief liaisons with men she hardly knows. Absolute inability to find a path that she can feel, adopt. Her life slips from bad to worse; she allows herself to sink with it almost voluntarily.
She has a child, from whom she seems to be increasingly estranged, even to the point where she considers him the son of her second husband, not “hers”. Her father is dead ; and her mother ? Why doesn't she question Kathrine? Is she, too, similar? She does not even expect explanations when she must take on more and more responsibility for her grandson.
Kathrine flees her own life. Until then she has never left the Arctic Circle. But she journeys as if in a dream. Passing through Paris, she doesn't even get out of the metro; she wanders among the halls and the windows of the fine shops underground and buys a bottle of expensive perfume, marked "Poison". More unformed territory.
And Christian, who has never even kissed her? She searches for him, knowing he doesn't want her, yet with her unhappiness fixed on him. In the depths of her being flutters the wing of a nameless hope.
It is then that everything begins to change for Kathrine, almost imperceptibly; she begins to see and listen, finally to herself as well as to others, and her path to a viable truth is picked out through a landscape of lies.
Because what is a lie? And what is it for? Why always, the lie? It is Harold, captain of the boat in Norway, who asks her the question:
“What do you think we would see if we cut a man into pieces? »
There wouldn't be much left.
A fine book, easily read, and sensitively constructed.
Merci à Vlad:
: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3558313326?
book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
C’est le cercle arctique. Le pays est sans doute aléatoire, mais c’est ce qui forme les habitants. Leur vie, les trois-quarts passées dans la nuit arctique, conforme à la nécessité. Où y en est l’espoir ? Comment y est l’amour ?
Le village n’a pas le temps de croire en Dieu, peut-être même pas le pasteur, homme sympa qui fait gentiment son métier. Pourtant il y en a qui sont croyants (la famille du mari de Kathrine), et leur certitude, leur cruauté systématique, sont opposées à l’apathie, la mollesse, en sorte, de la jeune femme, errant dans sa vie comme dans la grande obscurité du pays en hiver.
Elle semble incapable de s’aider, de sortir des situations créées de sa propre apathie, ou de son sens de son insuffisance. Deux mariages faillis. Liaisons brèves avec des hommes qu’elle ne connaît guère. Incapacité absolue de trouver un chemin qu’elle puisse sentir, adopter. Les choses glissent de pire en pire ; elle s’y enfond presque volontairement.
Elle a un enfant, duquel elle semble s’éloigner de plus en plus, même jusqu’au point où elle le considère comme fils de son deuxième mari, pas « le sien » . Le père de Kathrine est mort ; et sa mère ? Pourquoi ne questionne-t-elle jamais sa fille ? Est-ce qu’elle est faite du même matériel ? Elle ne s’attend pas même aux explications lorsqu’ elle doit prendre de plus en plus la responsabilité pour son petit-fils.
Kathrine fuit sa propre vie. Jusqu’à là elle n’est jamais sortie du cercle arctique. Mais elle voyage comme dans un rêve. En passant par Paris, elle ne sort même pas du métro ; elle erre, parmi les halles et les vitrines des beaux magasins souterrains et s’achète un flacon de parfum cher, marqué « Poison ». Encore de pays aléatoires.
Et Christian, qui ne l’a jamais même embrassée ? Elle le cherche, sachant qu’il ne veut pas d’elle, son cœur abruti se fixant sur lui. Au fond de son être, bat l’aile faible d’un espoir san nom.
C’est alors que tout commence à changer pour Kathrine, presque insensiblement ; elle commence à voir et à écouter, à elle-même autant qu’aux autres, et le chemin vers une vérité viable ne se distingue qu’à travers le pays du mensonge.
Car c’est quoi, le mensonge ? A quoi sert-il ? Pourquoi, toujours, le mensonge ? C’est Harold, capitaine du bateau en Norvège, qui lui pose la question :
« Que crois-tu qu’on verrait si on coupait un homme en morceaux ? »
Il n’en resterait pas grand ’chose.
Beau livre, facilement lu et délicatement achevé.
This is the Arctic Circle. The country may be formless, but it is what shapes the inhabitants. Their life, three-quarters of which is spent in the arctic night, conforms to necessity. Where is hope? What about love?
The village does not have time to believe in God, not even the pastor, a nice man who does his job, kindly. Yet there are those who are religious (the family of Kathrine's husband), and their certainty, their systematic cruelty, are opposed to the apathy, the softness, so to speak, of the young woman, wandering in her life as in the great darkness of the country in winter.
She seems unable to help herself, to get out of situations created by her own apathy, or her sense of inadequacy. Two failed marriages. Brief liaisons with men she hardly knows. Absolute inability to find a path that she can feel, adopt. Her life slips from bad to worse; she allows herself to sink with it almost voluntarily.
She has a child, from whom she seems to be increasingly estranged, even to the point where she considers him the son of her second husband, not “hers”. Her father is dead ; and her mother ? Why doesn't she question Kathrine? Is she, too, similar? She does not even expect explanations when she must take on more and more responsibility for her grandson.
Kathrine flees her own life. Until then she has never left the Arctic Circle. But she journeys as if in a dream. Passing through Paris, she doesn't even get out of the metro; she wanders among the halls and the windows of the fine shops underground and buys a bottle of expensive perfume, marked "Poison". More unformed territory.
And Christian, who has never even kissed her? She searches for him, knowing he doesn't want her, yet with her unhappiness fixed on him. In the depths of her being flutters the wing of a nameless hope.
It is then that everything begins to change for Kathrine, almost imperceptibly; she begins to see and listen, finally to herself as well as to others, and her path to a viable truth is picked out through a landscape of lies.
Because what is a lie? And what is it for? Why always, the lie? It is Harold, captain of the boat in Norway, who asks her the question:
“What do you think we would see if we cut a man into pieces? »
There wouldn't be much left.
A fine book, easily read, and sensitively constructed.
January 14, 2015
This was an interesting exercise. I first read this about four years ago, and intensely disliked it. But each time I saw it, or saw the book on Goodreads, I wondered if I would like it if I read it again. It just seemed the kind of book I would like; did I shortchange it? It's not as if it was badly written -- that type of book is easy to write off and never think of again.
So I picked it up again. In a different frame of mind, I guess, because this time I did like it.
It was all the things I said in my first review...[from first impression, when read in 2011: "Tedious, gray, half-hearted, no energy. The main character is supremely uninteresting and vaguely irritating. The story is told relentlessly at arms length."]...
But this time, I appreciated better that all of those qualities were perfect for the story that was being told. I'm glad I re-read it.
So I picked it up again. In a different frame of mind, I guess, because this time I did like it.
It was all the things I said in my first review...[from first impression, when read in 2011: "Tedious, gray, half-hearted, no energy. The main character is supremely uninteresting and vaguely irritating. The story is told relentlessly at arms length."]...
But this time, I appreciated better that all of those qualities were perfect for the story that was being told. I'm glad I re-read it.
February 22, 2020
Another selection from my backlist, a slim translated novel about a Norwegian-Sami woman named Kathrine who suffers through two unhappy marriages before the age of 30, and decides to finally venture out below the Arctic Circle.
Read
April 6, 2022Problems in Minimalism: The Description of Inner States
A minimalist narrative about a woman in Finnmark. Several reviewers have seen this as a narrative of self-discovery and "awakening," but Kathrine, the principal character, doesn't develop through the book, and she never has significant insights about herself. Most of her life, and the lives of the people she meets, are spent not thinking about themselves. In that respect this belongs more with Beckett's "Ill Seen Ill Said" than with novels of discoveries. Other reviewers have thought this is a book about a journey, but Kathrine's first trip south of the Arctic Circle doesn't occupy more than a quarter of the book. Stamm makes a point of saying the things Katherine photographs in France are nondescript, and she forgets the subjects of her photographs soon after she returns.
The book suffers from some of the common problems of indirect narration in minimalism. At times it's hard to believe Kathrine's lack of introspection, especially because the author of the book -- who is managing the narration of a character who isn't reflective -- is clearly introspective himself. It's not hard to believe in a character like Kathrine, who drifts from one encounter to another. It is more difficult to suspend disbelief that a character who can encounter, and describe, people as sharply drawn as Thomas and his family could also be as unaware of herself as Stamm wants us to imagine her as being.
At other times the book shows the commonplace signs of the writer's craft, which can be concealed in fuller, maximalist narratives, but tend to show through in minimalism. There's a scene in which Kathrine tries to imagine herself as a liar, making up stories (that's what novelists do, and sometimes it leaches into the story when characters are said to be trying to invent things, and having the same troubles that their narrators know so well); a scene in which a woman in a hotel doesn't speak, so it's necessary to guess about her past (that often happens to novelists, who can't always get rich background information on interesting people they encounter, so they have to make things up; again, it leaks into the narrative here); and scenes of traveling in which the details have clearly been noted as Stamm experienced them (episodes set on trains, with the usual paucity of characteristic details, caused simply by the limited time Stamm spent on such trains while thinking about this book). It fits "Unformed Landscape" that the descriptions of Finnmark are threadbare; but it is also a sign of the short time Stamm seems to have spent there. Compare the dim recollections of dim summers in this book with the dense, rich description in Vollmann's "The Rifles."
This amounts to saying that a book about a dimly perceived life, in a dim part of the world, should either be more strictly minimalist, or should permit its central character a greater richness of inner life: a problem inherent in minimalist treatments of minimal lives.
A minimalist narrative about a woman in Finnmark. Several reviewers have seen this as a narrative of self-discovery and "awakening," but Kathrine, the principal character, doesn't develop through the book, and she never has significant insights about herself. Most of her life, and the lives of the people she meets, are spent not thinking about themselves. In that respect this belongs more with Beckett's "Ill Seen Ill Said" than with novels of discoveries. Other reviewers have thought this is a book about a journey, but Kathrine's first trip south of the Arctic Circle doesn't occupy more than a quarter of the book. Stamm makes a point of saying the things Katherine photographs in France are nondescript, and she forgets the subjects of her photographs soon after she returns.
The book suffers from some of the common problems of indirect narration in minimalism. At times it's hard to believe Kathrine's lack of introspection, especially because the author of the book -- who is managing the narration of a character who isn't reflective -- is clearly introspective himself. It's not hard to believe in a character like Kathrine, who drifts from one encounter to another. It is more difficult to suspend disbelief that a character who can encounter, and describe, people as sharply drawn as Thomas and his family could also be as unaware of herself as Stamm wants us to imagine her as being.
At other times the book shows the commonplace signs of the writer's craft, which can be concealed in fuller, maximalist narratives, but tend to show through in minimalism. There's a scene in which Kathrine tries to imagine herself as a liar, making up stories (that's what novelists do, and sometimes it leaches into the story when characters are said to be trying to invent things, and having the same troubles that their narrators know so well); a scene in which a woman in a hotel doesn't speak, so it's necessary to guess about her past (that often happens to novelists, who can't always get rich background information on interesting people they encounter, so they have to make things up; again, it leaks into the narrative here); and scenes of traveling in which the details have clearly been noted as Stamm experienced them (episodes set on trains, with the usual paucity of characteristic details, caused simply by the limited time Stamm spent on such trains while thinking about this book). It fits "Unformed Landscape" that the descriptions of Finnmark are threadbare; but it is also a sign of the short time Stamm seems to have spent there. Compare the dim recollections of dim summers in this book with the dense, rich description in Vollmann's "The Rifles."
This amounts to saying that a book about a dimly perceived life, in a dim part of the world, should either be more strictly minimalist, or should permit its central character a greater richness of inner life: a problem inherent in minimalist treatments of minimal lives.
July 24, 2011
Kathrine, the heroine in UNFORMED LANDSCAPE, is yearning for the end of winter. "In summer, she drew the light into herself, in winter she had the feeling she wasn't alive, just half-alive, and dreaming." On this Saturday in April, when the slight twilight lifts the dark of winter, she is skiing some distance towards the lighthouse, and having left the last landmark of the village behind, she "glides out into the limitless white of the fjeld". The lighthouse keepers always welcome her, but "always told the same stories, talked uninterruptedly, and still they were as silent as the landscape." With short, deceptively uncomplicated, sentences Swiss author Peter Stamm creates an affecting visual rendering of the vast landscape of the north and the simple, yet hard lives of the inhabitants of this most northern region of Norway, far beyond the Arctic Circle. "The borders (between Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway) up here they look all alike. The borders were covered by snow, the snow joined up everything, and the darkness covered it over. The real borders were between day and night, between summer and winter, between the people." It is as much the "borders between summer and winter" as those "between the people" that Stamm explores with great sensitivity and depth in this brief, intense novel.
Kathrine, at twenty eight, has been going through life's routines without questioning. She works as a customs inspector at the harbour, boarding, primarily, Russian trawlers that regularly anchor there to unload their fish catch. With one failed marriage behind her and a child, she is marrying again. This time, with Thomas, she may be looking forward to a quieter and better life. Serious and successful in his work, Thomas comes from a wealthy family and he is good to her son. Kathrine should be happy. Yet, she is not and little by little doubts form in her mind about Thomas ideas of married life. "His life represented a bold stroke through the unformed landscape of her life." He is emptying their home from anything that she cares for, memories and, especially, her books. When a letter circulates in the village, written by Thomas' family, that insults and humiliates her, Kathrine leaves the house and, within a few days, the village. She travels south of the Arctic Circle, for the first time in her life, by ship and train all the way to France... Yet, the longer she travels the more she realizes that "[t]hings don't look any different on the other side", the towns there are more crowded, the people don't look any happier. Her initial resigned acceptance that she probably could not really restart her life elsewhere, slowly turns into a new recognition that "home" may be the place where she should rebuild her life. What would it take?
At some point, Kathrine realizes that "I am as I am, and that's it. For always". It is not said with resignation, it is the beginning for her to emerge from a darker inner place. In the German original, this thought is captured in its epigraph: "YOU BE LIKE YOU, ever", from a poem by Paul Celan. It is also, more or less directly, the advice Kathrine receives from her only real friends: two older and wiser ships captains and her childhood friend, Morten. They are not only excellent listeners, they are asking questions about her inner self. Nobody else does. With their help, she gradually learns to give some new shape or form to her inner "unformed" landscape.
Peter Stamm's story is not unusual nor the events dramatic, we may all know of somebody similar to Kathrine. What makes Stamm's novel different is the way he succeeds in getting into the young woman's mind, how he very gently brings out her gradual emotional growing. He does this in such an understated way that we find ourselves drawn to Kathrine and her story long before we become conscious how deeply she has affected our own thinking.
Kathrine, at twenty eight, has been going through life's routines without questioning. She works as a customs inspector at the harbour, boarding, primarily, Russian trawlers that regularly anchor there to unload their fish catch. With one failed marriage behind her and a child, she is marrying again. This time, with Thomas, she may be looking forward to a quieter and better life. Serious and successful in his work, Thomas comes from a wealthy family and he is good to her son. Kathrine should be happy. Yet, she is not and little by little doubts form in her mind about Thomas ideas of married life. "His life represented a bold stroke through the unformed landscape of her life." He is emptying their home from anything that she cares for, memories and, especially, her books. When a letter circulates in the village, written by Thomas' family, that insults and humiliates her, Kathrine leaves the house and, within a few days, the village. She travels south of the Arctic Circle, for the first time in her life, by ship and train all the way to France... Yet, the longer she travels the more she realizes that "[t]hings don't look any different on the other side", the towns there are more crowded, the people don't look any happier. Her initial resigned acceptance that she probably could not really restart her life elsewhere, slowly turns into a new recognition that "home" may be the place where she should rebuild her life. What would it take?
At some point, Kathrine realizes that "I am as I am, and that's it. For always". It is not said with resignation, it is the beginning for her to emerge from a darker inner place. In the German original, this thought is captured in its epigraph: "YOU BE LIKE YOU, ever", from a poem by Paul Celan. It is also, more or less directly, the advice Kathrine receives from her only real friends: two older and wiser ships captains and her childhood friend, Morten. They are not only excellent listeners, they are asking questions about her inner self. Nobody else does. With their help, she gradually learns to give some new shape or form to her inner "unformed" landscape.
Peter Stamm's story is not unusual nor the events dramatic, we may all know of somebody similar to Kathrine. What makes Stamm's novel different is the way he succeeds in getting into the young woman's mind, how he very gently brings out her gradual emotional growing. He does this in such an understated way that we find ourselves drawn to Kathrine and her story long before we become conscious how deeply she has affected our own thinking.
January 12, 2015
You know those
rare
books
in which the characters live in you
through out the day
while you are not reading?
This is one of those :-)
rare
books
in which the characters live in you
through out the day
while you are not reading?
This is one of those :-)
April 19, 2015
No tiene citas inolvidables, la trama no es extraordinaria, pero lo he disfrutado.
January 23, 2008
Bleak bleak bleak. Snow. Trudge trudge trudge through snow. Skis of the trudging kind, and slow journeys away from lout loser husbands to the South...which is, like, Belgium when you're Kathrine, the protagonist of this spare novel, who is a 20something living in the uppermost regions of Norway that most of us can't even fathom. All that happens is that she somehow manages to break from what she knows and venture away for awhile--and it changes everything. And did I mention bleak? As in the landscape, emotions, prose? And, yes, in a wonderful, starkly beautiful way. Why do we usually find only hothouse climates exotic? This is as much so, in an icy way. Sharp and unremittingly elegant.
February 11, 2020
Una historia ubicada en un lugar con paisajes gélidos, una oscuridad casi permanente, pueblo pequeño, donde no hay mucho que hacer. Pero donde viven seres humanos llenos de historias e inquietudes.
Vamos siguiendo la historia de la mano de Kathrine, una joven divorciada con un hijo que trabaja en la aduana, de una manera no lineal vamos conociendo su vida diaria, sus amores, sus deseos.
Lo que me sorprendió es la honestidad del personaje, a veces podría etiquetarse como una mala madre, una mala esposa, una mala hija e inclusive una mala trabajadora, pero esa percepción deriva de ese convencimiento,que tenemos que las mujeres siempre piensan más en los demás que en sí mismas, y ese pensamiento es el que permite a veces que muchas mujeres no lleguen a conocerse realmente o inclusive no se permitan siquiera pensar sobre la idea de felicidad.
A mi me gusta que la protagonista se equivoca, pero todo en búsqueda de lo que podrá hacerla sentir plena, e inclusive deja de ser mamá y pudiera verse como algo malo, pero esta búsqueda la hará ser una mejor mujer y por ende hacer mejor sus otros papeles.
Vamos siguiendo la historia de la mano de Kathrine, una joven divorciada con un hijo que trabaja en la aduana, de una manera no lineal vamos conociendo su vida diaria, sus amores, sus deseos.
Lo que me sorprendió es la honestidad del personaje, a veces podría etiquetarse como una mala madre, una mala esposa, una mala hija e inclusive una mala trabajadora, pero esa percepción deriva de ese convencimiento,que tenemos que las mujeres siempre piensan más en los demás que en sí mismas, y ese pensamiento es el que permite a veces que muchas mujeres no lleguen a conocerse realmente o inclusive no se permitan siquiera pensar sobre la idea de felicidad.
A mi me gusta que la protagonista se equivoca, pero todo en búsqueda de lo que podrá hacerla sentir plena, e inclusive deja de ser mamá y pudiera verse como algo malo, pero esta búsqueda la hará ser una mejor mujer y por ende hacer mejor sus otros papeles.
June 1, 2020
I have this thing where I have to start a book, but if it annoys or bores me, I'm allowed to abandon it and give it away. Life is just too short and my bookcase too big. But with this, I never quite managed to do that. I wasn't convinced by the remote, sparse language, but on a different level it captivated me and made me hang on. I kept waiting for something great to break through, something amazing to happen, be it in- or external, but it just didn't. It's a very quiet, unassuming novel, and the changes are so subtle and subcutaneous that they just slipped through my fingers.
It's a weird book.
It's a weird book.
March 26, 2011
I have traveled around northern Norway and this book really captures the countryside and the pace of life there. I thought the opening descriptions were brilliant, but by the end I found it hard going. I did finish it, but I'm not a big fan of stories that are just like life, that is, unresolved. Yes, there was some resolution, but not enough, I fear.
November 7, 2017
Ich muss offen gestehen: Ich liebe Peter Stamms Bücher.
Wie die andere Werke, die ich schon von Stamm gelesen habe, ist auch diese Geschichte - meiner Meinung nach - einfach wunderbar. Unglaublich traurig und gleichzeitig wunderschön.
Was mich persönlich getroffen hat, war wie Stamm so lebendig die norwegische/französische/dänische Landschaft und das Leben dort hervorzaubern kann, obwohl er Schweizer ist und die meiste seiner Geschichten in der Schweiz stattfinden.
Ich weiß nicht ganz genau wieso, aber Kathrine (und ihr Leben) faszinierten mich. Die Weise, worauf Stamm seine Charaktere hervorruft, hat auf mir die Auswirkung, dass es anfühlt, als ob ich diese Menschen selber kenne. Sie fühlen sich echt an. Obwohl Kathrine und ich uns überhaupt nicht ähneln, habe ich sie doch verstanden.
Wie die andere Werke, die ich schon von Stamm gelesen habe, ist auch diese Geschichte - meiner Meinung nach - einfach wunderbar. Unglaublich traurig und gleichzeitig wunderschön.
Was mich persönlich getroffen hat, war wie Stamm so lebendig die norwegische/französische/dänische Landschaft und das Leben dort hervorzaubern kann, obwohl er Schweizer ist und die meiste seiner Geschichten in der Schweiz stattfinden.
Ich weiß nicht ganz genau wieso, aber Kathrine (und ihr Leben) faszinierten mich. Die Weise, worauf Stamm seine Charaktere hervorruft, hat auf mir die Auswirkung, dass es anfühlt, als ob ich diese Menschen selber kenne. Sie fühlen sich echt an. Obwohl Kathrine und ich uns überhaupt nicht ähneln, habe ich sie doch verstanden.
August 8, 2020
Peter Stamms zweiter Bestseller nach Agnes. Die Geschichte einer jungen Frau, die nach Richtung sucht, und das in den buchstäblich dunklen Tagen im hohen Norden Norwegens . Peter Stamm erzählt unnahbar wie gewohnt und doch ist seine Sprache nicht so schlicht, wie man auf den ersten Blick glauben mag. Nach einigen Seiten hat einen das Buch doch noch in seinem Bann. Ich finde, der Text hat eine feine Poesie und endet zum Glück nicht ganz so ziellos, wie ich befürchtet hatte.
May 24, 2024
ich mochte kathrine nicht unbedingt und an den schreibstil musste ich mich auch gewöhnen, das ende fand ich aber ganz schön und passend zu all den gedanken, die über den verlauf des buches geäußert wurden
February 9, 2014
‘Het is niet veel, mijn leven, dacht ze…’
De verteltijd gaat snel in de eerste 50 bladzijden van deze onderkoelde, en juist daardoor zo aangrijpende roman. Er gebeurt niets in het leven boven de poolcirkel, het is er zes maanden donker en zes maanden licht, het fjeld ziet eruit ‘als een tekening die uit niet meer dan een paar strepen bestond. Rusland, Finland, Zweden of Noorwegen, hierboven zag alles er precies hetzelfde uit. De grenzen lagen onder de sneeuw, de sneeuw verbond alles, de duisternis dekte alles toe.’ De bewoners trouwen, scheiden, werken, drinken, werken, sterven…. Kathrine is nog nooit ten zuiden van de poolcirkel geweest. Ze is 28, douanebeamte en heeft een kind. Ze is gescheiden en hertrouwd met Thomas maar ook dat is geen gelukkige verbintenis. Ze had gedacht dat wat ze hadden liefde was, maar ‘zijn leven was een streep door het onbestemde landschap van haar leven’. Dan vertraagt het verteltempo en komen we meer te weten over de crisis waarin Kathrine zich bevindt. In een impuls vertrekt ze, met een schip van de Hurtigruten, ze wil uit haar poolcirkel breken en gaat op zoek naar Christian, een Deen met wie ze in haar dorp kennismaakte. Over zee en over land zakt Kathrine langzaam af naar het zuiden, naar het licht, maar dat wordt een teleurstelling. ‘Alles, had ze gedacht, zou anders zijn, aan de andere kant van de poolcirkel. Ze had werelden gefantaseerd, schitterende, bonte werelden vol vreemde dieren en mensen, net als in de boeken van Jules Verne (…) Maar ze had nauwelijks iets gezien wat ze thuis of in Tromsø niet ook al had gezien. Er is niet veel plaats in een mens, dacht ze.’
Wanneer ze in Boulogne naar de zee zit te kijken vraagt ze zich af hoe haar leven eruit gezien zou hebben als ze hier was geboren en fantaseert ze dat ze misschien dit of dat of zus of zo en hoe dat voor Randy, haar zoontje, zou zijn. We zijn in de helft van het boek en het is de eerste keer dat de naam ‘Randy’ valt. Voordien werd er alleen maar gesproken over ‘het kind’. Een mooi symbool voor het keerpunt in dit verhaal, al is er geen sprake van een weloverwogen inzicht bij Kathrine. Eerder lijkt het of haar reis haar verzoent met het leven dat ze heeft en met het ontbreken van grootse gebeurtenissen daarin. ‘… ik ben hier niet geboren, dacht ze, het heeft geen zin. Ik ben zoals ik ben, voor altijd.’
Kathrine gaat terug, neemt haar kind bij de hand en samen nemen ze het leven terug op. De verteltijd valt stil en in luttele zinnen worden de jaren weer samengevat.
‘Het werd herfst en winter. Het werd zomer. Het werd donker en het werd licht.’
Een roman die er sterren bijkrijgt nadat je er afstand van hebt proberen te nemen.
De verteltijd gaat snel in de eerste 50 bladzijden van deze onderkoelde, en juist daardoor zo aangrijpende roman. Er gebeurt niets in het leven boven de poolcirkel, het is er zes maanden donker en zes maanden licht, het fjeld ziet eruit ‘als een tekening die uit niet meer dan een paar strepen bestond. Rusland, Finland, Zweden of Noorwegen, hierboven zag alles er precies hetzelfde uit. De grenzen lagen onder de sneeuw, de sneeuw verbond alles, de duisternis dekte alles toe.’ De bewoners trouwen, scheiden, werken, drinken, werken, sterven…. Kathrine is nog nooit ten zuiden van de poolcirkel geweest. Ze is 28, douanebeamte en heeft een kind. Ze is gescheiden en hertrouwd met Thomas maar ook dat is geen gelukkige verbintenis. Ze had gedacht dat wat ze hadden liefde was, maar ‘zijn leven was een streep door het onbestemde landschap van haar leven’. Dan vertraagt het verteltempo en komen we meer te weten over de crisis waarin Kathrine zich bevindt. In een impuls vertrekt ze, met een schip van de Hurtigruten, ze wil uit haar poolcirkel breken en gaat op zoek naar Christian, een Deen met wie ze in haar dorp kennismaakte. Over zee en over land zakt Kathrine langzaam af naar het zuiden, naar het licht, maar dat wordt een teleurstelling. ‘Alles, had ze gedacht, zou anders zijn, aan de andere kant van de poolcirkel. Ze had werelden gefantaseerd, schitterende, bonte werelden vol vreemde dieren en mensen, net als in de boeken van Jules Verne (…) Maar ze had nauwelijks iets gezien wat ze thuis of in Tromsø niet ook al had gezien. Er is niet veel plaats in een mens, dacht ze.’
Wanneer ze in Boulogne naar de zee zit te kijken vraagt ze zich af hoe haar leven eruit gezien zou hebben als ze hier was geboren en fantaseert ze dat ze misschien dit of dat of zus of zo en hoe dat voor Randy, haar zoontje, zou zijn. We zijn in de helft van het boek en het is de eerste keer dat de naam ‘Randy’ valt. Voordien werd er alleen maar gesproken over ‘het kind’. Een mooi symbool voor het keerpunt in dit verhaal, al is er geen sprake van een weloverwogen inzicht bij Kathrine. Eerder lijkt het of haar reis haar verzoent met het leven dat ze heeft en met het ontbreken van grootse gebeurtenissen daarin. ‘… ik ben hier niet geboren, dacht ze, het heeft geen zin. Ik ben zoals ik ben, voor altijd.’
Kathrine gaat terug, neemt haar kind bij de hand en samen nemen ze het leven terug op. De verteltijd valt stil en in luttele zinnen worden de jaren weer samengevat.
‘Het werd herfst en winter. Het werd zomer. Het werd donker en het werd licht.’
Een roman die er sterren bijkrijgt nadat je er afstand van hebt proberen te nemen.
January 14, 2020
I read this book recently for the second time in 2019. I read it the first time in 2014. The book remains excellent and a favorite of mine. I find very little to change in my earlier review which remains below. I'd add that the resolution "by normality and routine" reminds me of Pushkin talking about Mrs. Larin in "Eugene Onegin" and indeed of Anya Seton and her protagonist in "Avalon." Below is my review from 2014.
I liked this book very much, but find it difficult to review. There is an arc of plot. That is, there is a beginning, middle, and end. But the protagonist is not a person of great character or personality. She is, indeed, an unformed landscape. The form that she finds is ordinary with an ordinary life. But her transformation to form is an interesting journey from passivity through one attempt at meaning through relationship all the way to middle-class settled life. The ending seems anticlimactic, except that the protagonist is likeable and courageous amidst her fecklessness. Perhaps this book is the journey of any ordinary unformed person against the backdrop of routine and habit. Most of us are that person. The backdrop seems dull, but that does not mean that the journey is dull, that life is not intensely important to the individual.
Very briefly, the heroine is a Norwegian customs officer who lives above the Arctic Circle in an isolated village near the sea in that area where Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia come together. National boundaries exist on maps, but have no reality in the expanse of country. The irony of her job as a customs officer is evident. It is as if her form is bounded by the plywood walls of job, motherhood (on which she does not seem very keen), two marriages, village living, and regular ski trips to the lighthouse. I think that a specific event brings her to the realization of the rickety nature of what gives her life shape. She makes a journey below the Arctic Circle for the first time in search of something with more steadiness, at least in her mind. Not meeting with success, she returns to the village and finds her form by happenstance.
All this is put together very well to the point that the writer has the heroine bring her customs uniform with her on what I have described as the trip below the Arctic Circle. The events are so tiny, so understated, yet with great effects on individual lives. Even in a routine life, the human heart is not routine.
I liked this book very much, but find it difficult to review. There is an arc of plot. That is, there is a beginning, middle, and end. But the protagonist is not a person of great character or personality. She is, indeed, an unformed landscape. The form that she finds is ordinary with an ordinary life. But her transformation to form is an interesting journey from passivity through one attempt at meaning through relationship all the way to middle-class settled life. The ending seems anticlimactic, except that the protagonist is likeable and courageous amidst her fecklessness. Perhaps this book is the journey of any ordinary unformed person against the backdrop of routine and habit. Most of us are that person. The backdrop seems dull, but that does not mean that the journey is dull, that life is not intensely important to the individual.
Very briefly, the heroine is a Norwegian customs officer who lives above the Arctic Circle in an isolated village near the sea in that area where Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia come together. National boundaries exist on maps, but have no reality in the expanse of country. The irony of her job as a customs officer is evident. It is as if her form is bounded by the plywood walls of job, motherhood (on which she does not seem very keen), two marriages, village living, and regular ski trips to the lighthouse. I think that a specific event brings her to the realization of the rickety nature of what gives her life shape. She makes a journey below the Arctic Circle for the first time in search of something with more steadiness, at least in her mind. Not meeting with success, she returns to the village and finds her form by happenstance.
All this is put together very well to the point that the writer has the heroine bring her customs uniform with her on what I have described as the trip below the Arctic Circle. The events are so tiny, so understated, yet with great effects on individual lives. Even in a routine life, the human heart is not routine.
July 8, 2007
The reader is drawn in by this strange but credible tale of a young Norwegian girl who has always lived north of the Arctic Circle in a remote seaside port. Although she has a job and a young child, she is terribly lonely. Only after two unsuccessful marriages does she begin to discover the outside world and, more importantly, the feelings within herself which she has always suppressed. The simplicity of the author's style is almost provocative, but by the end you feel that he has touched upon a universal truth, as inescapable as the rhythm of lightness and darkness in the North.
November 4, 2019
Ehrliches und faszinierendes Portrait einer jungen Frau, die sich ein wenig verloren fühlt. Typisch für Peter Stamm sind mit viel Sorgfalt formulierte Beschreibungen und Analogien zwischen Personen und Landschaften seiner Bücher. Allerdings kann die etwas weniger dichte Geschichte in "Ungefähre Landschaft" nicht mit Stamm's Debut "Agnes" mithalten.
October 12, 2016
Kept waiting for it to get interesting. The main character is insipid and self centered. Her treatment of herself and the characters that are supposed to be close to her is shallow and short sightedly immature. Thank god it was a short read.
June 27, 2017
I think Unformed Landscape is my favorite of Peter Stamm's novels, though they are all wonderful.
November 22, 2012
I discovered Peter Stamm through a review of his short story collection, ‘In Strange Gardens and Other Stories’. When I thought of reading one of Stamm’s books, I decided on ‘Unformed Landscape’, as the storyline of this book appealed to me very much. I finished reading it yesterday. Then I opened the book on the first page and re-read all my favourite passages again. And again. Here is what I think.
Kathrine is a Customs inspector in a coastal village in Norway. It is a village in Norway, but it is really a place where different people live. As one of the early pages in the book says :
Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, up here they all looked alike. The borders were covered by snow, the snow joined everything up, and the darkness covered it over. The real borders were between day and night, between summer and winter, between the people.
Kathrine is married to a well-to-do man, Thomas, and has a son from an earlier marriage. On paper everything is hunky-dory. The only problem is that Kathrine’s husband tries to change his wife everyday. He imposes his lifestyle, values, interests, habits on her and at some point Kathrine feels that she is living not in her own house but in someone else’s house.
She had thought they were building something together, but it was just Thomas building her into his life, trying to mold her, to train her, until she suited him, and suited the type of life he planned to lead. Until her own apartment was as foreign to her as his parents’ house, as he was, and as the life she led with him.
Then one day things reach a flashpoint. Kathrine has a one-night stand with her childhood friend, Morten. When her husband and his family discover this, things turn unpleasant. Soon, Kathrine packs her bags and leaves her village, takes a ship and goes into the sea. She has read about all the wonderful places of the world in books like Jules Verne’s novels. Though she has never travelled south of the Arctic circle, ever in her life, now she wants to see some of these exotic places and have interesting adventures. But when she goes to one new place after another, meets new people from different countries, makes new friends, she is in for a surprise. Things are not what she imagined them to be. They are very different. But they are also not very different from the way things are in her coastal village.
Kathrine felt disappointed. So many years she had been dreaming of a trip to the South. She had supposed that everything would be different south of the Arctic Circle. She had pictured worlds to herself, wonderful, colorful worlds full of strange animals and people as in the books of Jules Verne she had liked so much as a child. Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But this world wasn’t very different from the world of home. Everything was bigger and noisier, there were more people around, more cars on the streets. But she had hardly seen anything that she hadn’t seen at home or in Tromso. There’s not a lot of room in a person, she thought.
She had seen so much in the last two weeks, so much that she had never seen before, and yet she had the feeling she hadn’t seen anything at all. That people had different faces, she had already known. She had known that there are some houses that are bigger and more beautiful than others. A thousand times a thousand makes a million, and it wasn’t necessary to go to Paris to find that out.
Kathrine meets one her old friends Christian, in Paris. They spend some time together. Then Christian has to leave. Now, Kathrine has to decide what she wants to do with her life. Should she go back to her old life – her husband who doesn’t care about her feelings, her son, her old job? Or should she go back to her old village and see whether there are still sparks in her relationship with Morten? Or should she start a new life in one of the new places that she is visiting? What Kathrine decides on and what happens after that form the rest of the story.
‘Unformed Landscape’ is a beautiful, slim book. I liked it very much, starting from the title, to the name of the heroine (I have seen it spelled Catherine, Catharine, Katherine, Katharine and Kathryn, but this is the first time I have seen it spelled Kathrine – how many variations exist in one name!), to the beautiful prose of Peter Stamm, to the beautiful evocation of the Norwegian landscape, to the beautiful passages which come throughout the book. Even the last sentences of the book – ‘It was fall, then winter. It was summer. It got dark, and then it got light again’ – said many things. Peter Stamm’s spare prose was perfect. (I really tacked in this sentence here, to use the phrase ‘spare prose’ By the way, is it ‘spare prose’ or should it be ‘sparse prose’? Is there a difference between both the phrases? What do you think?) I was dreading that there will be an unpleasant surprise in the end, like some of my favourite authors had done before – like Muriel Barbery does in ‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ and E.L.Swann does in ‘Night Gardening’. Fortunately, Stamm doesn’t do that. The ending is nice and elegant, even if it has a predictable element to it. I liked most of the characters in the story – the people who live in the village and the people whom Kathrine encounters during her travels. Even her husband Thomas has some redeeming qualities, though I didn’t like him much.
After reading ‘Unformed Landscape’ I thought about it. Or rather I thought about one aspect of it. The writer Peter Stamm is Swiss, but most of the story is set in Norway and the main characters are Norwegian. In a sense it is a Norwegian novel. But it wouldn’t be classified under Norwegian literature. It would be classified under Swiss literature and under German literature, because it was written in German. I thought of other books which were similar. I could think of Patrick Süskind’s ‘Perfume’ and ‘The Pigeon’ (the novelist is German, the books are written in German, but all the characters are French and the story happens in France) and Vikram Seth’s ‘An Equal Music’ (the author is Indian, the book is written in English, all the characters are English and the story happens in England). We normally see this happening in historical novels and in detective novels (like Alexander McCall Smith’s No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series), but it is interesting that this is happening in literary fiction too. What do you think about this?
‘Unformed Landscape’ is one of my favourite reads of German Literature Month. Its potential competitors for the top spot might be Herta Müller’s ‘The Land of Green Plums’ and Bernhard Schlink’s ‘The Reader’. It is also one of my favourite reads of the year. I want to read all of Stamm’s books now. It is nice that he doesn’t write chunksters. I want to read his book ‘Seven Years’ next.
I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.
The Music
The music in the bar was lovely. There was something glassy about it, and the rhythm seemed to fit with Kathrine’s heartbeat, her breathing, which kept accelerating. She made herself breathe more slowly, and before long she had the feeling she was only breathing out, or in and out simultaneously. It was as though she’d left the room, and was passing through a landscape, hovering over a landscape of sounds. When she shut her eyes, she saw brightly colored patterns that opened out like delicate fans or flowers. The patterns were yellow and purple and hemmed with black lines. They looked like gentle hills. It was beautiful, and Kathrine felt at ease.
Laughing alone
Kathrine laughed, and was surprised at the sound of her laughter in the quiet apartment. It wasn’t her laugh at all. She laughed to hear herself laughing. Strange, she thought, that you cry alone, but never laugh. I’ve never laughed alone before.
Marriage
“Is your wife competent?”
“Very. Our marriage works best when I’m away. Then she can do whatever she wants.”
“And when you’re there, then she does whatever you want, is that it?”
“Then I do what she wants.”
Being bored
She had never been bored, even though her life was monotonous, even though nothing happened in the village. Her favorite days had been the ones where everything was exactly as always. Only Sundays had sometimes bothered her.
On Faith
She didn’t believe in God. Almost no one in the village believed in God, perhaps not even the vicar, who was a nice man, and did his job same as everyone else.
***
“The people here believe in God, they just don’t believe in Jesus,” Ian said once, “they believe in the Creation, but they don’t believe in love.”
“Well, Creation exists,” said Kathrine, “whereas love…”
***
Kathrine didn’t believe what the minister was saying, and yet his words were comforting to her. Perhaps it was enough if he believed it, or Alexander’s wife believed it, or Ian or Svanhild. Perhaps it was enough if the minister just spoke the words. Perhaps it was enough that they were all assembled here, that they were thinking of Alexander, that they would remember him later, and this day and this hour.
Have you read Peter Stamm’s ‘Unformed Landscape’? What do you think about it?
Kathrine is a Customs inspector in a coastal village in Norway. It is a village in Norway, but it is really a place where different people live. As one of the early pages in the book says :
Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, up here they all looked alike. The borders were covered by snow, the snow joined everything up, and the darkness covered it over. The real borders were between day and night, between summer and winter, between the people.
Kathrine is married to a well-to-do man, Thomas, and has a son from an earlier marriage. On paper everything is hunky-dory. The only problem is that Kathrine’s husband tries to change his wife everyday. He imposes his lifestyle, values, interests, habits on her and at some point Kathrine feels that she is living not in her own house but in someone else’s house.
She had thought they were building something together, but it was just Thomas building her into his life, trying to mold her, to train her, until she suited him, and suited the type of life he planned to lead. Until her own apartment was as foreign to her as his parents’ house, as he was, and as the life she led with him.
Then one day things reach a flashpoint. Kathrine has a one-night stand with her childhood friend, Morten. When her husband and his family discover this, things turn unpleasant. Soon, Kathrine packs her bags and leaves her village, takes a ship and goes into the sea. She has read about all the wonderful places of the world in books like Jules Verne’s novels. Though she has never travelled south of the Arctic circle, ever in her life, now she wants to see some of these exotic places and have interesting adventures. But when she goes to one new place after another, meets new people from different countries, makes new friends, she is in for a surprise. Things are not what she imagined them to be. They are very different. But they are also not very different from the way things are in her coastal village.
Kathrine felt disappointed. So many years she had been dreaming of a trip to the South. She had supposed that everything would be different south of the Arctic Circle. She had pictured worlds to herself, wonderful, colorful worlds full of strange animals and people as in the books of Jules Verne she had liked so much as a child. Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But this world wasn’t very different from the world of home. Everything was bigger and noisier, there were more people around, more cars on the streets. But she had hardly seen anything that she hadn’t seen at home or in Tromso. There’s not a lot of room in a person, she thought.
She had seen so much in the last two weeks, so much that she had never seen before, and yet she had the feeling she hadn’t seen anything at all. That people had different faces, she had already known. She had known that there are some houses that are bigger and more beautiful than others. A thousand times a thousand makes a million, and it wasn’t necessary to go to Paris to find that out.
Kathrine meets one her old friends Christian, in Paris. They spend some time together. Then Christian has to leave. Now, Kathrine has to decide what she wants to do with her life. Should she go back to her old life – her husband who doesn’t care about her feelings, her son, her old job? Or should she go back to her old village and see whether there are still sparks in her relationship with Morten? Or should she start a new life in one of the new places that she is visiting? What Kathrine decides on and what happens after that form the rest of the story.
‘Unformed Landscape’ is a beautiful, slim book. I liked it very much, starting from the title, to the name of the heroine (I have seen it spelled Catherine, Catharine, Katherine, Katharine and Kathryn, but this is the first time I have seen it spelled Kathrine – how many variations exist in one name!), to the beautiful prose of Peter Stamm, to the beautiful evocation of the Norwegian landscape, to the beautiful passages which come throughout the book. Even the last sentences of the book – ‘It was fall, then winter. It was summer. It got dark, and then it got light again’ – said many things. Peter Stamm’s spare prose was perfect. (I really tacked in this sentence here, to use the phrase ‘spare prose’ By the way, is it ‘spare prose’ or should it be ‘sparse prose’? Is there a difference between both the phrases? What do you think?) I was dreading that there will be an unpleasant surprise in the end, like some of my favourite authors had done before – like Muriel Barbery does in ‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ and E.L.Swann does in ‘Night Gardening’. Fortunately, Stamm doesn’t do that. The ending is nice and elegant, even if it has a predictable element to it. I liked most of the characters in the story – the people who live in the village and the people whom Kathrine encounters during her travels. Even her husband Thomas has some redeeming qualities, though I didn’t like him much.
After reading ‘Unformed Landscape’ I thought about it. Or rather I thought about one aspect of it. The writer Peter Stamm is Swiss, but most of the story is set in Norway and the main characters are Norwegian. In a sense it is a Norwegian novel. But it wouldn’t be classified under Norwegian literature. It would be classified under Swiss literature and under German literature, because it was written in German. I thought of other books which were similar. I could think of Patrick Süskind’s ‘Perfume’ and ‘The Pigeon’ (the novelist is German, the books are written in German, but all the characters are French and the story happens in France) and Vikram Seth’s ‘An Equal Music’ (the author is Indian, the book is written in English, all the characters are English and the story happens in England). We normally see this happening in historical novels and in detective novels (like Alexander McCall Smith’s No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series), but it is interesting that this is happening in literary fiction too. What do you think about this?
‘Unformed Landscape’ is one of my favourite reads of German Literature Month. Its potential competitors for the top spot might be Herta Müller’s ‘The Land of Green Plums’ and Bernhard Schlink’s ‘The Reader’. It is also one of my favourite reads of the year. I want to read all of Stamm’s books now. It is nice that he doesn’t write chunksters. I want to read his book ‘Seven Years’ next.
I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.
The Music
The music in the bar was lovely. There was something glassy about it, and the rhythm seemed to fit with Kathrine’s heartbeat, her breathing, which kept accelerating. She made herself breathe more slowly, and before long she had the feeling she was only breathing out, or in and out simultaneously. It was as though she’d left the room, and was passing through a landscape, hovering over a landscape of sounds. When she shut her eyes, she saw brightly colored patterns that opened out like delicate fans or flowers. The patterns were yellow and purple and hemmed with black lines. They looked like gentle hills. It was beautiful, and Kathrine felt at ease.
Laughing alone
Kathrine laughed, and was surprised at the sound of her laughter in the quiet apartment. It wasn’t her laugh at all. She laughed to hear herself laughing. Strange, she thought, that you cry alone, but never laugh. I’ve never laughed alone before.
Marriage
“Is your wife competent?”
“Very. Our marriage works best when I’m away. Then she can do whatever she wants.”
“And when you’re there, then she does whatever you want, is that it?”
“Then I do what she wants.”
Being bored
She had never been bored, even though her life was monotonous, even though nothing happened in the village. Her favorite days had been the ones where everything was exactly as always. Only Sundays had sometimes bothered her.
On Faith
She didn’t believe in God. Almost no one in the village believed in God, perhaps not even the vicar, who was a nice man, and did his job same as everyone else.
***
“The people here believe in God, they just don’t believe in Jesus,” Ian said once, “they believe in the Creation, but they don’t believe in love.”
“Well, Creation exists,” said Kathrine, “whereas love…”
***
Kathrine didn’t believe what the minister was saying, and yet his words were comforting to her. Perhaps it was enough if he believed it, or Alexander’s wife believed it, or Ian or Svanhild. Perhaps it was enough if the minister just spoke the words. Perhaps it was enough that they were all assembled here, that they were thinking of Alexander, that they would remember him later, and this day and this hour.
Have you read Peter Stamm’s ‘Unformed Landscape’? What do you think about it?
June 8, 2020
What makes you grow up, take charge of your life, instead of believing that you are only idling away till an adult comes and helps you become one of them? We go through life looking for someone to sort us out. Things happen to us. We make choices by default, believing that they can be corrected later if they don't pan out. Our life is an unformed landscape, we allow others to form their structures on it.
At the outset it looks like Kathrine makes her own choices. She has a job, she gets pregnant, marries, divorces. Then marries again. But, when we explore a little, her choices seem to be made for her. She says yes when she wants to break up. She doesn't go for a honeymoon because her husband doesn't feel the need to. She allows him to mold her apartment and her self. Even her eventual mistrust in him comes from the outside. She goes on a journey to escape a scandal, but the journey becomes a coming of age.
I really liked this book, because it is stark and minimalist, and yet says a lot about coming of age through travel. In her travel, she finds nothing different, and that itself is a revelation. She seems less than impressed with the people she meets or the landscapes that emerge in front of her. But at the end of the journey, she seems to have formed an impression nevertheless, of what it means to make choices for yourself. It probably happens when she realises that Christian expresses envy for her life, or may be when she shares a holiday with three Swedish women who have come on their own escape. Or when Hagar says she is looking for too much from other. Perhaps it was all these little bits adding up over the three weeks, but she returns with a clarity and confidence.
At the outset it looks like Kathrine makes her own choices. She has a job, she gets pregnant, marries, divorces. Then marries again. But, when we explore a little, her choices seem to be made for her. She says yes when she wants to break up. She doesn't go for a honeymoon because her husband doesn't feel the need to. She allows him to mold her apartment and her self. Even her eventual mistrust in him comes from the outside. She goes on a journey to escape a scandal, but the journey becomes a coming of age.
I really liked this book, because it is stark and minimalist, and yet says a lot about coming of age through travel. In her travel, she finds nothing different, and that itself is a revelation. She seems less than impressed with the people she meets or the landscapes that emerge in front of her. But at the end of the journey, she seems to have formed an impression nevertheless, of what it means to make choices for yourself. It probably happens when she realises that Christian expresses envy for her life, or may be when she shares a holiday with three Swedish women who have come on their own escape. Or when Hagar says she is looking for too much from other. Perhaps it was all these little bits adding up over the three weeks, but she returns with a clarity and confidence.
March 7, 2022
I have to admit trudging through this book as I would do in this bleak landscape as I would translate the book's title: bleak prospects and outlooks, bad choices made by a woman who has been through two unsuccessful marriages and doesn't seem to get on track or find the way out, until the end when after heading southwards for a while decides to finally return to her roots and settles down. Third time lucky I suppose. Not badly written or difficult to read, just a little depressing and bleak for my likings.. We have all made mistakes in our choices in life and I suppose this one highlights it against a very bland background..
May 30, 2025
pues me ha gustado mucho
una buena novela —clara, concisa, sobria— con un estilo que parece habitual en el autor (lo conocí con "Agnes" hace ya algún tiempo y también me gustó, aunque algo menos, y temas y estilos eran parecidos a los de "Paisaje aproximado") sobre una mujer a la que desespera el invierno sin luz del norte de Noruega, donde ha vivido toda su vida
frases cortas, sin adornos, sin descripción van tejiendo una novela en el fondo luminosa sobre una crisis existencial de su protagonista
seguiré leyendo a Peter Stamm sin duda
una buena novela —clara, concisa, sobria— con un estilo que parece habitual en el autor (lo conocí con "Agnes" hace ya algún tiempo y también me gustó, aunque algo menos, y temas y estilos eran parecidos a los de "Paisaje aproximado") sobre una mujer a la que desespera el invierno sin luz del norte de Noruega, donde ha vivido toda su vida
frases cortas, sin adornos, sin descripción van tejiendo una novela en el fondo luminosa sobre una crisis existencial de su protagonista
seguiré leyendo a Peter Stamm sin duda
September 9, 2020
It (the book) seems cold and distant at the beginning, just like the soul of a Northerner. But gradually it opens up to allow you some glimpses into the inner mechanisms of a woman which is (apparently) nothing more than a plain person from the northern parts of Europe. Norwegian, Sami, Finn, nationality does not define the character. But we are getting to see it as a full being throughout the novel.
January 23, 2018
Ne znam precizno objasniti zašto me se ova knjiga toliko dojmila. Možda zbog stila kojim je pisana, možda zbog toga što, iako mi se ne sviđa i ne pronalazim logiku i objašnjenje za većinu njezinih postupaka, ipak prepoznajem, u ovom ili onom obliku, dijelove Katharine i dijelove njezinog života u sebi i ljudima koji su nekad okrhnuli i dotaknuli moj život.
June 29, 2022
Ein typisches Werk Prosa.
Wirkt oft oberflächlich und langweilig und kann dennoch überzeugen. In diesem Werk fehlte mir allerdings eine gewisse Grunddynamik. Die Story blubbert von Beginn bis zum Schluss gleichbleibend so vor sich hin.
Die grundaussage war dennoch schön und auch heute noch realitätsnah
Wirkt oft oberflächlich und langweilig und kann dennoch überzeugen. In diesem Werk fehlte mir allerdings eine gewisse Grunddynamik. Die Story blubbert von Beginn bis zum Schluss gleichbleibend so vor sich hin.
Die grundaussage war dennoch schön und auch heute noch realitätsnah
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