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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unformed Following Dysfunction, October 6, 2009
This review is from: Unformed Landscape (Paperback)
Painfully spare account of a year or two in the life of a young civil servant, an introspective woman not physically described but surely comely, and spare as well, who had not much ventured from her seaside village somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. One unloving spouse, then another, still in her twenties, a beautiful child not yet unhappy, a Protestant minister who hanged himself in the terminal one long dark night, a Dad who toiled for nothing and withered to nothing, a fine suitor lost at sea off a trawler, infrequent sex brief as the light and cold as the thin clear air, all resolved with more great sadness. A beautiful human evocation of the bleakness of the north and, as someone noted, recalling Camus's hopeless landscapes of the Sud.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Like a Scandinavian Film, November 12, 2005
Peter Stamm sets Unformed Landscape in the remotest area of Norway, in a village that can only be reached by boat, where most people either fish or work for the fish factory. It is near the borders with Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Stamm describes the political borders, covered by snow and darkness, as irrelevant and ignored. "The real borders were between day and night, between summer and winter, between the people."
The central character is Katherine, a young woman who works for the customs service; she spends much of her time inspecting Russian boats for illegal cigarettes and vodka. She is only twenty-two at the beginning of the story, but she is already divorced from the father of her son, a boy who is never referred to by name until half way through the novel. She likes her job because she meets many people who have seen the outside world; Katherine has been to Hammerfest twice, but she has never been south of the Arctic Circle. The best day of her life was the day she rode in a helicopter to make a raid on a Russian trawler; she enjoyed seeing the fjords from the air. She has very few options in her life. She is agrees to marry Thomas because it might improve her situation; this proves to be a bad decision.
I do not want to reveal too much, to spoil the mystery of the story, which covers six years of Katherine's life. It takes most of the novel for the reader to come to know the quiet woman, whose past is revealed very slowly by the author.
Reading Unformed Landscape feels a lot like watching a Scandinavian film; I was surprised to learn the author is Swiss. He probably has seen many European films; he has one of his characters watch Truffaut's Belle du Jour. I suspect anyone who enjoys Ingmar Bergen films will enjoy this novel.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Tidying Up is Half of Life ..., July 16, 2011
This review is from: Unformed Landscape (Paperback)
... thought Kathrine."
Christian, the man she's come all the way from the Arctic to France in hopes of loving, is of a similar mind: "The less you make yourself at home," he says, "the easier it is to leave." Elsewhere, in Aarhus, Denmark, Kathrine observes that the world is all just houses and people, "bigger and noisier" but nothing really that she hadn't seen at home. "There's not a lot of room in a person," she feels. "Ungefähre Landschaft" is the story of Kathrine's running away from and returning to ... to what? Kathrine was, as my own Nordic family would say, 'behind the door when enchantment was passed out.' Enchantment is what she seeks, and enchantment is what she has no ability to feel. Her emotional life is as bleak as the snowbound darkness of the village where she lives, north of the Arctic Circle in Norway. After two failed marriages and a child she has no attachment to, Kathrine simply goes 'AWOL' from her past.
This English translation of this bleakly moving novella, by Michael Hofmann, is likely to be excellent. Hofmann is a poet as well as an extraordinary translator of Kafka, Joseph Roth, and his own father Gert Hofmann. I discovered the Swiss author Peter Stamm by looking for other books Hofmann had chosen to translate but then ordering the German language edition. I have no doubt that "Unformed Landscape" will be adequately translated, partly because of Hofmann's skill and partly because Peter Stamm's writing style is as terse and sparse as the thoughts of the characters he portrays. Several critics have tried to suggest that "Ungefähre Landschaft" ends as a testament to Kathrine's bravery for seeking the "light" that is so scanty in her Nordic fringeland, or that she comes back to a life made richer by her encounters with the sensory South. I'm not sure I buy that interpretation; my impression is that she comes back simply disenchanted with her own longing for enchantment, so that she can live as people live: "It was fall, then winter, then it was summer again. It got dark and then it got light."
Kathrine's story is not a tale of yesterday. She works as a customs inspector. She has a computer and e-mail, and of course TV and cinema. Though she's never in her 28 years traveled below the Arctic Circle before, she has images in mind of Stockholm, Paris, and even of Africa. In other worlds, her isolation isn't what her elders had known. She is both interconnected and insulated, as "we" all are in the modern world, where the boundaries of peoples are rendered as inconsequential by electronics as the boundaries of Norway, Sweden, Russia by the all-equalizing snow. And how is one to be surprised, enchanted, when almost nothing is as brightly colored as the images we've seen of it electronically? This is a novella of the Age of Cinema; it reads virtually as a scenario for a powerful film about a young woman's longings. The language is extremely chary of description, as if the author knew that no words could be pictorial enough for people who could visualize his narrative through a camera. But it's true, isn't it? We no longer need word-pictures of the Arctic, or the flat fields of France seen through the windows of a train, or the bunkrooms of a seaman's hostel, since we've seen all those on the silver screen? Actually, I think this novella would make a stunning film; it almost films itself. One has to wonder if words can possibly compete with cinematography any more....
... but Peter Stamm, by the very unadorned bluntness of his language, makes a case for the emotive power of words. Without squandering sentences describing his Kathrine's outer appearance, Peter Stamm shows us her inner being. You won't easily forget her, though you couldn't find her in a crowd.
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