Overstaying by Aeriane Koch
Swiss fiction
Original title – Die Aufdrängung
Translator – Damion Searls
Source – Personal copy
I said yesterday I was tempted by the translated titles from the US Republic of Consciousness prize longlist. This was already on my radar after hearing it on the One Bright Book podcast it is the debut novel from the writer and had won several book prizes when it came out. I think this is one of those books that is hard to say what it is as it isn’t sci fi sci-fi horror it is lots of bits put together. It’s one of those books that seems to have come from nowhere. The writer is a performance artist on the side; you can see it in the book. I will try and do what they did on One Bright Book and try to add context to this mad book.
My reputation seems to have improved since the visitor has been occupying my house and my time. For example, there are neighbor children who never used to even glance at me, who now constantly kick soccer balls into my yard, supposedly by accident, so that they can knock on my front door and gawk at the visitor.
Every time this happens the visitor jumps up to offer them candy, and I don’t prevent him. It’s all the same to me whether or not he’s planning to poison the neighbor children. They’re all right, because they’re small, but then again they’re not that small; now that I think about it, they have chubby thighs.
The neighbor children suck on their exotic candies, still gawking, but they don’t move from the front door.
I contemplate availing myself of the broom, or the herd of spooky vacuum cleaner nozzles. The visitor beats me to it, though, by laughing and trying to hold the children’s hands, at which they run back outside, shrieking.
The vacumm cleaners that had risen up it seems alla bit weird!
The book is set in what seems to be a sort of near future where there aren’t many people, and there are visitors. We glimpse the visitor who, hat, lives with our Narrator. Then we have odd little pieces like the Hooovers, who seem to have come to life and tried to take over. We have the narrator, the daughter and granddaughter of a family that has lived in this village for many years. She seems to have a past hinted at throughout the book. The Visitor is never described. We have things mentioned like him having a sort of relationship with the hoovers and brush fingers. There is a sense our narrators are drawing close to each other. The book is odd erie at times and overs like a typical everyday story. It is one of those that you need to read. It is surreal in a different way. The book seems to drift as well at times, it seems like time has stopped, if that makes sense, this could have been days, weeks or even years in the book
The visitor refuses to accept that the earth turns, that the sun alternatingly rises and sets. He takes every day like the first ever, gets out of his bed, puts on a blinded face, and waddles across the balcony, squinting at the surrounding panoramic vista – he knows no name for anything, has no memory at all of yesterday when I identified each individual mountain peak for him by means of a short lecture.
His morning rituals are a mystery to me. He twirls his hair with his fingers, slurps milky liquids from giant bowls, wears fake fur draped around his shoulders. The visitor is one big tackiness, an insult to the aesthetic eye. I feel sympathy for him, for he imitates a hippie or a woolly mammoth or some other extinct species, which doesn’t much help him understand the present. He stays lost in his own thoughts while work is being done, while money is being shoveled into accounts, while the day is being given a certain rhythm.
He, on the other hand, moves through time in circles.
At times is he a post war cave man I wondered as well !
I said I try to capture this book well. If a Swiss post-apocalyptic soap opera was set in a small village directed by David Lynch, it would be this. But then I recently rewatched the early Whose Line is it anyway? The recent death of Tony Slattery made me think this could be a sketch of the setting of a soap opera, the characters from an alien encounter film in the style of slow-burning romance as the world falls apart. I feel this is one of those books that you just can’t say it’s like this book or that book I’ve read as it is just a little surreal in that what she has done is captured that ordinary story but with a few surreal pieces. Another image I had was Dysons marching around like the hammers did in the film The Wall, but that is just me. Have you read this book or have a favourite work that is a little surreal?
Related
Published by
