On A Day Like This

A new novel of artful understatement about mortality estrangement and the absurdity of life from the acclaimed author of Unformed Landscape and In Strange Gardens. On a day like any other Andreas changes his life. When a routine doctors visit leads to an unexpected prognosis a great yearning takes hold of himbut who can tell if it is homesickness or wanderlust? Andreas leaves everything behind sells his Paris apartment; cuts off all social ties; quits his teaching job; and waves goodbye to his days spent idly sitting in cafesto look for a woman he once loved half a lifetime ago. The monotony of days has been keeping him in check; now he hopes for a miracle and for a new beginning. . Andreas travels lead him back to the province of his youth back to his hometown in Switzerland where he returns to familiar streets where his brother still lives in their childhood home and where Fabienne a woman he was obsessed with in his youth visits the same lake they once swam in together. Andreas still consumed with longing for his lost love and blinded by the uncertainty of his future is tormented by the question of what might have been if things had happened differently. . Peter Stamm has been praised as a stylistic ascetic and his prose as distinguished by lapidary expression telegraphic terseness and finely tuned sensitivity (Bookforum). In On a Day Like This Stamms unobtrusive observational style allows us to journey with our antihero through his crises of banality of living in his empty world and the realization that life is finitethat one must live it as long as that is possible.