In Paris, Peter Stamm is a bit at home. In his publisher’s offices, not far from a famous department store transposed into his latest novel, he recounts in perfect French tinged with a slight accent how this city made him a writer.
“It was in 1983, I was 19-20 years old, I arrived as an accountant but I knew I wanted to write. I came from a small town where everyone knew each other. When I got here, I saw that you could disappear without a trace and I told myself that I could try to leave one. » Surprising from an author, once a journalist and film critic, whose main motive is disappearance.
From Agnes (1998), his first book, Peter Stamm cultivates the vague, the uncertain, with recurring motifs such as his childhood village and a youthful love which haunts the male characters. In each other (2017), a man goes into the mountains without us really knowing if he is dead or alive. In the Archives of feelings (2023), a librarian searches through files in his cellar retracing the career of a variety singer he once loved.
Homage to Camus, the Gentle Indifference of the world (2018) features the meeting between a writer and a young woman who reminds him of a past love. “In all my books, there are always two worlds, a reality and an unreal world. What interests me is the relationship between the two, and memory. I’m not looking for immortality, but perhaps to form a certain beauty, to understand. »
Never make a plan and leave it to chance
Reference to this uncertain moment between day and night, the title of his latest novel contains all the art of Peter Stamm. In Blue Houra young director, Andrea, and her fiancé, Tom, are filming a documentary in Paris about Richard Wreshler, a famous writer who seems to be slipping through their fingers.
While they wait for her in Switzerland, Wreshler disappears, forcing the documentary filmmaker to reconstruct her life using clues taken from her books. “I was inspired by a real situation: filmmakers asked me if they could follow me to make a film about the writing process. I also wanted to play with autofiction, which I don’t like because I sometimes find it too simple. »
If his character is quite far from himself, and much less sympathetic, Peter Stamm has put some of his ideas on literature into his mouth. Like his way of never making a plan and leaving it to chance: “His death for example: I hadn’t planned to kill him but after a while, he annoyed me and I made him die, that freed me a lot. »
Rather than Pessoa and Beckett, who run through the novel, he cites Pavese, Hemingway, Chekhov, Simenon and Camus as his “family of writers”. In his childhood village, there is now a Peter Stamm path. “Normally we do this after someone dies. I told them: be careful, maybe I’ll do something stupid and you’ll have to rename it. » Always uncertainty.
The Blue Hourby Peter Stamm, translated from German (Switzerland) by Pierre Deshusses, Bourgois, 230 pages, 21 euros
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