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    Unformed Landscape: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Unformed Landscape: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Unformed Landscape: A Novel
    Ebook145 pages2 hours

    Unformed Landscape: A Novel

    By Peter Stamm and Michael Hofmann

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateFeb 23, 2010
    ISBN9781590514085
    Unavailable
    Unformed Landscape: A Novel

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    Reviews for Unformed Landscape

    3.5/5

    38 ratings2 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Abandoned half way through. Tedious, gray, half-hearted, no energy. The main character is supremely uninteresting and vaguely irritating. The story is told relentlessy at arms length.
    • 3/5
      A minimalist narrative about a woman in Finnmark. Several reviewers see 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 seen this as 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, and only involves on peripheral character in her life. 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 emotional and narrative 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 an un-self-reflective character -- is clearly introspective himself. It's not hard to believe in a character like Kathrine, who drifts from one encounter to another. It is hard 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 being. At other times the book shows the commonplace signs of the writer's craft, which can be concealed in fuller and maximalist narratives, but tend to show through in minimalism: a scene in which Kathrine tries to imagine herself as a liar, making up stories (that's what novelists do every second, and sometimes it leaches into the story when characters in the story are said to be trying to invent things, and having the same troubles that novelists routinely have); a scene in which a woman in a hotel doesn't speak, so it's necessary to guess about her past (that happens all the time to novelists, who can't always get rich background information on interesting people they encounter, so they have to make it up; again, it leaks into the narrative here); and scenes of traveling in which the details have clearly been noted as Stamm experienced them, or failed to experience them (scenes on trains, with the usual paucity of characteristic details, caused simply by the limited time Stamm spent on such trains). It fits this book that the descriptions of Finnmark are threadbare; but it is also a sign of the lack of time Stamm spent there. Compare the dim recollections of dim summers in this book with the unbelievably rich description in Vollmann's "The Rifles."I suppose 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.