Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

We're Flying by Peter Stamm

2013; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 87; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2013.0144

1945-8134

Gregory H. Wolf,

Eastern European Communism and Reforms

Jaan Kaplinski Selected Poems Bloodaxe Books The personal website of Jaan Kaplinski features the distant silhouette of birds against a blue sky subtly dappled with clouds. The verse in Selected Poems shows a similar influence of nature with subtle Zen undertones. This collection gathers poems written between 1973 and 2004 and translated from Estonian as well as newer poems written in English. Thomas Kabdebo No Matter Where I Am, I See the Danube Phaeton Publishing Thomas Kabdebo recounts the postwar Stalin years of his childhood, his involvement in the Hungarian Revolution, and the events leading up to becoming a successful author in this autobiographical portrait of twentiethcentury Hungary. Now living in Ireland, he continues to augment his prolific output of writing and translating. Nota Bene recounts the story of Joseph, a tenyear -old child whose Jewish parents have been forced to leave him in an orphanage under the protection of Father Pons, an infinitely benign Catholic priest. The plot charts Joseph’s encounter with the threat of the Holocaust, but his initiation has more to do with the art of mastering subterfuge and ingenuity than with bearing witness to the truly horrific nature of Nazism. A genre in its own right, the Holocaust seen through the eyes of a child has been graced with a number of powerful novels and films over the last few decades, the most salient of these in the francophone literary field being the groundbreaking autobiographical novel Un sac de billes (1973; Eng. A Bag of Marbles, 1974) written by Joseph Joffo. Schmitt’s novel makes an obvious nod toward Joffo’s work by also calling his narrator Joseph. Although Noah’s Child is competently written, the homage is ultimately poor strategy; Schmitt’s story fails to compare favorably. It never attempts to measure the same breadth of historical realism and, as such,possesseslessemotionalintensity. Although Noah’s Child can conceivably be enjoyed by adults (its best-seller status confirms that it can), it seems like the kind of book that would be ideal if one were to introduce a preadolescent to World War II: it hides the horrors even more reassuringly than Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful while offering a sometimes captivating boy’seye view of Nazi occupation. Some of Joseph’s defamiliarizing perceptions are amusingly colorful. On the whole, however, Father Pons’s surname tends to backfire, reminding one of the French word poncif, the rather tired, hand-medown generic conventions. The problem lies on the side of what André Gide once said: “Great literature is not achieved through lofty sentiments.” It takes a novelist as inventive as Dickens to give the lie to that. This being said, a number of Schmitt’s other works are stirring and imaginative. Schmitt manages to make a concerted effort to leave most of these “bons sentiments” behind in theatrical works such as L’école du diable (1999; see WLT, Winter 2000, 107) and Le libertin (1997). Erik Martiny Paris Sciences et Lettres Peter Stamm. We’re Flying. Michael Hofmann, tr. New York. Other Press. 2012. isbn 9781590513248 Critically acclaimed throughout European literary circles, Swiss author Peter Stamm achieved his breakthrough in the United States with the translation of his novel Seven may– june 2013 • 67 reviews Years in 2011. In We’re Flying, an anthology of two collections of short stories originally published in 2008 and 2011, Stamm presents a wide range of “everyday” characters from Swiss life to thematize loss, confusion , banality, and anxiety. With a minimalist prose, attention to detail, and a focus on internal struggles instead of external conflicts, Stamm has been compared to Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, and Franz Kafka. Stamm’s stories present the reader an almost voyeuristic gaze into the lives of characters to reveal contrasts of hope and disillusion, acceptance and rejection, failure and success, and bleakness and humanity. In “Children of God,” a minister falls in love with a young girl who becomes pregnant; “The Suitcase” portrays an elderly man with his comatose wife in the hospital; and “Sweet Dreams” is about a young couple forced to move back to their parents’ house. In “Years Later,” Wechsler relocates to his boyhood village after a failed marriage, only...