Alex is caught between two women: one, Sonja, highly desirable, intelligent and independent, and Iwona, drab, quiet, uneducated and totally dedicated. Sonja makes him feel inadequate and constrained, with Iwona he feels confident and free. He is married to one, but cannot let go of the other ... In his recent novel, SEVEN YEARS, Swiss author Peter Stamm explores the complications of intimate human emotions and relationships, seen primarily from the perspective of the man in the middle. Summing up the novel's gist at this overview level, it doesn't sound like much of a new or even appealing story. However, Stamm's writing is in an unexpected way catching; his ability to reflect, through the mind of his character Alex, on deeper layers of the human psyche, is meaningful and thought provoking beyond the actual story. Being both subject and object of his frequent musings, Alex's detached self-analyses are intriguing: they expose his shifting views of guilt and regret, his dithering between recognition of betrayal and hurt and assertion of breaking free and resolving the conundrums of his situation...
When the novel begins, Alexander has become a reasonably successful architect, especially since he teamed up in life and work with Sonja, his brilliant and ambitious friend from student days. Born into a modest family background, he lacks the confidence of some of his friends, who come from well-to-do families and exude self-assurance and behave accordingly. Sonja's family tends to look down on Alex, making him feel inferior and inadequate, despite his efforts to please and fit in. Nonetheless, "in essence, all was perfect", he describes his marriage many years later during one of his 'confession' sessions with Antje, his wife's close friend and confidante, "there was nothing that I didn't like about Sonja, and my life was exactly as I had wished for." And yet, Sonja is drawn to "creative and lively" Marseille, whereas Alex feels more comfortable in somewhat "parochial" Munich, and even new opportunities in Berlin after the fall of the Wall don't tempt him out of his comfort zone. When, after seven years into his marriage, he has reason to revisit Iwona, he can't do otherwise than rekindle the old affair. Iwona, an illegal immigrant from Poland, lives in great poverty and does not seem to care, sustained solely by her strong religious beliefs and her conviction that Alex is the only man for her. Alex is both attracted to and repulsed by Iwona and cannot respond to her complete devotion to him. He can treat her in whatever way he wants, come and go as he pleases... Over the years she has aged less than gracefully, yet, he remains obsessed with something physical in her that he cannot comprehend or explain. While she is holding considerable power over him, she makes him also feel free and unencumbered by the constrains of his "other" life.
I found very little to like in any of the three central protagonists in this novel. Portrayed mainly through Alex's perception of them, the women come across as overdrawn in the personal characteristics that sets them apart. The two sets of parents - Alex's and Sonja's - also often demonstrate formulaic behaviour of people of their respective social standing. At times, they all appear to be more stereotypical than real, suggesting that they are intended more as constructs to explore the central character's changing frame of mind as he stumbles through life. While Alex may not analyze the impact of his social background on his behaviour towards the two women, the reader is frequently alerted to it. The most realistically and personably portrayed individuals are secondary characters in the novel such as Antje, Alex's occasional "confessor", who tends to represent Sonja's interests better than she can apparently argue them herself.
Stamm's primary focus in the novel is Alex and his complicated and perplexed psyche and the resulting behaviour patterns, set against the realities he lives through. "A person who loves has always already won", Alex, referring to Iwona, defends himself and counters Antje's objection, "it is worse not to have loved, than not to have been loved." Yet, another time, talking about Sonja, he admits "Maybe, our relationship functioned, just because we never really became close." Especially in the occasional confession session with Antje, more fundamental questions on the intricacies of interpersonal relationships come to the fore: What has love and a perfect life got to do with physical obsession or infatuation? Is passion an inferior form of love?
It is surprising to me how the author succeeds in keeping my interest, despite, or maybe because of, maintaining a very detached tone throughout the novel. He applies a style that has Alex's reminiscences flow uninterruptedly into sections of dialog and back, jumping in timelines from past to present to past to future (?). Throughout the novel he draws us into a reality that is both irritating and familiar until the end that is as unexpected as it is logical and meaningful. Reading the novel in its original, all translations are mine and I have maintained the name spellings of the German text. [Friederike Knabe]
