What do we know about what the person we love thinks and feels?

I wonder what it is that I like so much about this narrator, one of my favorite writers. None of his books have ever disappointed me! It makes no difference whether you read a novel or a collection of short stories by him: the style is unmistakable (short, sharp, elegant sentences; very insightful psychological observations, always subtle). But the style of Patrick Modiano is also unmistakable, and I have very little interest in French literature. Peter Stamm's narrative situations—the setting, the spaces in which the action or thought unfolds—are very attractive to me: but so are those dreamed up by Jonathan Franzen and Eider Rodríguez, for instance, and to me, the books by these two authors, while quite remarkable, do not move me as much as those of the Swiss author.

Stamm excels at presenting the muted tension within his couples: something that reveals the extreme fragility of their pact. In this new collection of stories, this happens in the one titled The First Snow, a story that deserves to be in any anthology of the genre: a couple with two children is queuing on the highway to enjoy the snow for a few days. The woman, tired of the traffic, gets out at a service area, and, a few minutes later, at the restaurant, the man receives a work call. He leaves the large room where all four had been sitting, and, upon re-entering after a while, he sees that the wife and children have vanished. What happens from that moment on, the reader will discover for themselves. I will only say that Stamm never ceases to surprise us, because existence is, very often, unexpected. Another exponent of surprise (in this case, even more disconcerting): the story titled Dietrich's Knee. It deals with a couple who begin to suffer the inevitable wear and tear of living together. Flirting with someone else might soothe these first ravages... The ending, however, will leave the reader completely bewildered.

Stamm does not refrain from granting, if he feels like it, a chance to the miracle, but his conception of life as a couple, for example, rather unsettles us: What do we know about what the person we love thinks and feels? And yet, some of the stories end well, if we understand each other: The most beautiful dress is a story about the limits (and the fear) of seduction. In this short distance of shared affections, the narrator becomes an implacable observer (and a rigorous, insuperable chronicler). Sabrina, 2019 explores the obsession of a young woman who has modeled for a sculpture. Everything that reaches her from the statue –there is a moment when she calls it exactly that: statue– is inconvenient, even hurtful to her. Cold reading, a story set in Barcelona, confronts us with a slightly exaggerated, almost improbable whim of chance: the protagonist –who is sightseeing in our capital– ends up, fortuitously, at the house of a card reader, who we never quite know if he is an impostor or someone who knows their stuff. Be that as it may, this totally unforeseen circumstance –many speakers now would inadequately call it surreal– contributes to the woman being able to untie, in the end, some of the psychological knots that have not stopped tormenting her in recent years.

Some of Stamm's characters, the most daring ones, subscribe –as one of them says– “to the idea of having a hidden face". It is this: the narrator empowers them so they never fully settle into the inertia of resignation. The stories take place in cities, in wooded mountains, on the shore of a lake (how important are lake settings in his literature!). They read paper newspapers, use phone booths, listen to music on CDs (in this they could be individuals from a Modiano book). The young protagonist of My blood is for you –who, at the company where she works, has become friends with a man in his fifties who has always felt excluded from society, almost a pariah– states: “If I have learned anything in life, it is that in love what counts is not experience, but devotion”. The joy of authentic literature!