Stella [Paperback]

Siegfried Lenz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 2010

In a small town on the Baltic coast, in a community steeped in maritime industries and local mores, a teenager falls in love with his English professor. Christian looks older than his years, Stella younger than hers. The summer they spend together is filled with boat rides to Bird Island, secret walks on the beach, and furtive glances. The emotions that blossom between Christian and Stella are aflame with passion and innocence, and with an idealistic hope of a future. The two lovers manage to keep their mutual attraction concealed, but as the hot months comes to an end, their meetings become more difficult to conceal.
   Stella begins at the end, at Stella Petersen’s memorial service, where Christian relives the memories he shared with his first love. There is nothing salacious about their relationship, nor is it just a case of a teenager’s crush on his teacher. Their affair changes both Christian and Stella, allows them to expand their views, and pushes them out of social and familial constraints. Theirs is a tender love story of a time, and yet speaks to any time; it is actually through death that their love is transformed.
   The sparseness of Siegfried Lenz’s narrative is reminiscent of the existential stringency of Ernest Hemingway. Only a master stylist ofhis standing could compose such a story that is equally modest and powerful, a work that leaves a lasting authentic impression, and that strives to comply with W.H. Auden’s famous request, “Tell me the truth about love.”

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The unaffected terseness that prevents this short German translation from feeling fully fleshed also lends it its charm: it feels like something you’ve read—and felt—before but have long since lost to time. It tells the story of 17-year-old Christian, a boatman’s son on the Danish-German border who falls in love with his English teacher, Stella, in the late 1960s. For a while, the tale shuttles between flashbacks and Stella’s funeral without so much as a paragraph break for warning. Christian’s first-person narrative is similarly jumbled as he randomly addresses Stella in the second person: “She was laughing; she seemed to find our misadventure funny. You were always ready to laugh.” Their secret affair suffers the expected trials, but it’s Christian’s insistence upon imposing normalcy onto an abnormal situation that hints at a Humbert Humbert–style frenzy. That’s not to say Christian’s love isn’t true—it is crushingly, blindingly true, which itself signals tragedy long before the fateful incident occurs. Lenz’s handling of obsession is deft; it’s as easy to identify with Christian as it is to damn him. --Daniel Kraus

Review

“Like W.G. Sebald at his best, Lenz solicits the reader’s grief through lexical restraint: the story’s sedate tone, combined with its nautical-rural setting, perfectly renders the texture of a daydream.”—The New Yorker

“We can thank heaven for a small – but exquisite – mercy in the shape of Siegfried Lenz’s [Stella]….a superbly crafted novella of first love, with a tenderly evocative sense of place, mood and era….Suggestively rich in overtones and undercurrents, Lenz's beautiful miniature also stands alone as a masterclass in ‘the grammar of farewell’.”—The Independent

“This book expresses, with extreme subtlety . . . the torments of first love and the pain of parting . . . [It] stands poignantly beside the tales of such lovers as Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet.” —L’Express
 
“We have Siegfried Lenz to thank for a poetic book—perhaps his most beautiful.” —Marchel Reich-Ranicki, Frankfurter Allgemeine 
 

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Other Press (August 3, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590513355
• ISBN-13: 978-1590513354
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 7.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #651,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Minute of Silence, September 19, 2010

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stella (Paperback)

"A minute of silence" (Schweigeminute) is the original title of this deceptively simple novella by Siegfried Lenz, which takes place during a memorial assembly for Stella Petersen, a young teacher of English at a German high school, somewhere on the Baltic coast. As the president of his class, Christian, the protagonist, has been asked to deliver a eulogy. He refuses, because his connection to Stella is deeper and more personal, and he wants just to be left alone with his memories. Memories mainly of the preceding summer, which Christian spent helping his father build breakwaters, taking tourists on boat trips round a nearby island, and getting to know his young teacher whenever occasion threw them together.

You can see this short book being made into a bittersweet art-house movie, either in black and white or breeze-blown sun-bleached colors. It has an understated perfection in which very little actually happens but where knowing and unknowing, awakening and loss, hang suspended in a salt summer haze. Lenz, a former associate of Günter Grass, writes with a simple clarity matched by few other contemporary writers. The translation by Anthea Bell is a good one, but it makes me wish that I was reading in German, the better to appreciate the author's straightforward style. The book jacket compares him to W. G. Sebald, the author of AUSTERLITZ, though Lenz is far more transparent. But the comparison has some justification, in that both authors carry their message as much by what is not said as by what is.

By extraordinary coincidence, I opened this book immediately after reading and reviewing another contemporary novella -- THE LAST ESTATE by Conor Bowman -- which is also about the love of a schoolboy for his young teacher, and whose leading character even has the same name, Christian! But beyond that, the two could not be more different. Although both books begin very tenderly, Bowman's contains much stronger color (including jealousy, violence, and murder) and quite explicit eroticism. Lenz paints in watercolors. He allows his hero similar fulfillment, but the talisman that his Christian keeps most precious in his memory is a night spent with Stella, fully clothed, sleeping side by side on the same pillow. Most stories of teenage love are about the access of knowledge, carnal or otherwise. Lenz, by contrast, writes of the persistence of un-knowing: the things one can never fully know about another person, though one may well discover more about oneself in the process of trying.

Though fully alive to the reader, Lenz's Christian is always presented ambiguously, as though never sure of his standing. He recounts Stella's doings in the third person, but every so often jumps to "you," addressing her memory directly. The eulogy is actually delivered by a peer, Georg Bisanz, whom Christian refers to as "Stella's favorite pupil" -- and continues to do so, even after he himself has found a place in Stella's affections that surely trumps Georg's. His meetings with Stella are relatively few; he is well aware that she continues her own life in between them -- seeing other members of the staff, going off on a yacht for several days with friends among the Danish islands -- but he never finds out the details, even when he meets the young man whose photograph she keeps in her room, signed "Stella, with love; Colin." For a while, the reader tries to be cleverer than Christian, looking for evidence of subplots that will eventually create a climax in the manner of a conventional novel. But they never come -- and there is a silent beauty in their absence.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Love is a warm bearing wave...", October 7, 2010

By 

Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stella (Paperback)

Eighteen-year old Christian, high school student in a small seaside town along the Baltic Sea coast, is a silent participant in the memorial gathering for highly popular English teacher, Stella Peterson. While others praise her youthful and lively personality, express their respect or admiration for the colleague and teacher, Christian is absorbed by his own memories of Stella. In a confident, if somewhat nostalgic, tone and a very tender gentle feel for his young narrator, octogenarian Siegfried Lenz has written a touching, dreamy and somewhat idealistic love story that, tragically, ended before it had really begun.

Using the memorial assembly at the school as the frame for his novella, Lenz has Christian tell his story. His mind moves between the present and the recent past. In the now, he addresses Stella directly, expressing his intimate thoughts and feelings, his dreams of a future that he was too reticent and shy to express before. Alternating the direct voice with his account of the previous summer's events that brought Stella into his inner circle and intimately close to him. Stressing the duality of timelines, Lenz applies voice changes between the direct "you", and indirect "she" for Stella, sometimes quite abruptly. Evoking the atmosphere of the beautiful seascape around the small maritime town and describing its summer activities the reader gains insights into Christian's life, complementing his evolving love for his teacher. Christian helps his father, a "stone fisher", in the strengthening of the breakwater barriers, he takes tourists around Bird Island, and joins with friends in the annual summer festival. Stella is enjoying all the events and more, allowing the secret romance to evolve. With the depiction of the surroundings and summer activities Lenz creates a second, important narrative frame that, at least to me, adds depth and plausibility to a story that is more about a young man growing up into a new world of emotions than the depiction of an "affair". Consequently, beyond Christian's perception of her, Stella remains an enigma, her actions open to questions. She lived in Christian's imagination more than in life. The "warm bearing wave" of love, her note, written on a postcard to Christian, is the only message left to him that will have to carry him beyond the grief.

Siegfried Lenz is a highly regarded German author of long standing with a large body of fiction and non-fiction work. This short prose work, written in 2008, was his first to break a long silence following a devastating personal tragedy. Having read the book in its original German, I cannot comment on the English translation. His language is straight forward and easy and subtle when describing the very few private encounters of "the lovers". It seems to me, however, that the English title 'STELLA' is somewhat misleading; Stella is not at all in the centre of the story. The German title "Schweigeminute" - minute of silence - captures the core of the novella much better. [Friederike Knabe]

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Didn't quite feel it, June 15, 2011

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Bluestalking Reader "Bluestalking Reader" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stella (Paperback)

Teenaged Christian falls in love with his lovely teacher Stella. The attraction is mutual and turns sexual. When Stella dies, Christian is unsurprisingly crushed. The story alternates between the progressing relationship between Christian and Stella and his devastation at her loss. Great plot premise, and a book I'd recommend as a quick, interesting read, especially in summer or when you're looking to beef up your "books read" numbers. The downside: I never fully felt Christian's pain, nor the reason for the deep and immediate attraction between the two. Stella wasn't developed enough. Actually, a lot of things weren't. It was somewhat formulaic in nature. The taboo attracted me; I love unconventional stories of love, especially if they end badly. You might say I don't believe in romance, and you'd be quite right. Well-written but left me with a feeling of disappointment.