All Days Are Night: A Novel

by Peter Stamm, Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Overview

A novel about survival, self-reliance, and art, by Peter Stamm, finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize

All Days Are Night is the story of Gillian, a successful and beautiful TV host, content with her marriage to Matthias, even if she feels restless at times. One night following an argument, the couple has a terrible car accident: Matthias, who is drunk, hits a deer on the wet road and dies in the crash. Gillian wakes up in the hospital completely disfigured. Only slowly, after many twists and turns, does she put her life back together, and reconnects with a love interest of the past who becomes a possible future—or so it seems. In Stamm’s unadorned and haunting style, this new novel forcefully tells the story of a woman who loses her life but must stay alive all the same. How she works everything out in the end is at once surprising and incredibly rewarding.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590516973
Publisher:	Other Press, LLC
Publication date:	11/04/2014
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	252
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Peter Stamm is the author of the novels Seven Years, On a Day Like This, and Unformed Landscape, and the short-story collections We’re Flying and In Strange Gardens and Other Stories. His prize-winning books have been translated into more than thirty languages. For his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction, he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. He lives in Switzerland.
 
Michael Hofmann has translated the work of Gottfried Benn, Hans Fallada, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and many others. In 2012, he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His Selected Poems was published in 2009, and Where Have You Been? Selected Essays in 2014. He lives in Florida and London.

Reading Group Guide

All Days Are Night Reading Group Guide

1. Describe the sense of alienation and displacement Gillian experiences—from her body, her home, her family, and her past decisions. Do you think these experiences are brought about by her disfigurement, or were they there even before her accident? How does Gillian’s relationship with her body change over the course of the novel?

2. What is Gillian’s relationship with invisibility? Think of her game as a child (p 9), her position as a public figure recognized for her beauty and the effect that has on her relationship with Matthias, the floor-length windows in her apartment, and her moving to her parents’ vacation home.

3. On page 68 Hubert tells Gillian, “This isn’t a photo shoot. Can’t you just look normal? As if you were alone?” What is Gillian’s relationship to the male gaze? Are there ever moments in the narrative when she is free of it?

4. What is the significance of Gillian’s training as an actress? In what ways is she put on display even when she is not at work? Who else is put on display in the novel, and what relationship does Gillian have with them?

5. On page 77 we learn, “She couldn’t account for what it was about Hubert that attracted her.” Why do you think Gillian is attracted to Hubert?

6. What effect does the change in point of view have on your reading experience?

7. On page 132 Jill says, “That’s a frightening thought, isn’t it, that you’re capable of killing someone with your art.” How does art influence and inform Gillian and Hubert’s lives? How does your understanding of Hubert’s art change when the narrative changes to his point of view?       

8. What is the difference between the two times Hubert sketches Gillian?

9. Does Gillian or Hubert experience “lived moments[s]” (p 147)? What brings about these moments? How do they differ for each character?

10. Why do you think Gillian returns again and again to moments from her childhood?

Editorial Reviews

The first half of the novel is a remarkable extended study of a woman and her body, its pains, its changes, its "points of reference." It derives tension from the fact that even before her accident, Gillian existed chiefly through the image others had of her; without a face, she is no longer sure she exists at all. Stamm's careful, pared-down narrative [is] translated from German with great suppleness by Michael Hofmann…

The New York Times Book Review - Lauren Elkin

09/08/2014
Gillian, a prosperous television personality, wakes up in a hospital with her face horribly disfigured, and her husband, Matthias, dead, a casualty of a car crash that followed an argument at the end of a night of revelry. As Gillian slowly recovers physically—her nose is reconstructed from tissue throughout her body—her emotional wounds, the cause of her marital discord, resurface: Matthias discovered provocative photographs of her and assumed she was having an affair. From here, the novel travels back through time, revealing the source of the photographs, which were not snapped by a lover but by an artist, Hubert, whom Gillian once interviewed. Her interest in Hubert’s paintings, specifically his nudes, draws her to him, and Hubert invites her to collaborate on an ill-fated series of sketches and paintings. The collaboration falls apart shortly before the accident. The novel then moves back to Gillian’s recuperation, during which Hubert stays away, and it isn’t until years later that the two reunite and reconcile. This brief volume speaks eloquently about recovery and reinvention. Stamm (Seven Years) alternates his narrative between Gillian and Hubert, sometimes having both recall the same moments; it’s Gillian’s story that truly flourishes. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Stamm's careful, pared-down narrative, translated from German with great suppleness by Michael Hofmann, stops to notice all mirrors, all reflective surfaces or cameras, anything and anyone involved in visually representing the world. How can you see, Stamm's novel asks, when everyone is looking at you? How can you make art under that kind of pressure?" —The New York Times Book Review

"[A] complex, psychological tale...riveting...intensely moving." —The Wall Street Journal

"[An] engrossing story of recovery." —The New Yorker

"Quietly surprising." —New York Review of Books

"A postmodern riff on The Magic Mountain...a page-turner." —The Atlantic

"The lucidity of Peter Stamm’s writing contrasts with the complexity of his characters...he has similarities with Gerbrand Bakker and Helle Helle, whose protagonists are as opaque their creators’ writing is clear. In laying bare his characters’ vulnerability and illogical behaviour, Stamm renders the lives of the ordinary as fascinating as the studies of any anthropologist." —The Guardian

"This brief volume speaks eloquently about recovery and reinvention." —Publishers Weekly

"All Days Are Night air[s] the psychological implications of our beauty obsession and the insidious ways in which it can obscure selfhood." —The New Republic

"A slim novel filled with big ideas about art and identity." —Kirkus

"A tour de force [that] concern[s] itself with the mutability of identity. Stamm eschews middlebrow concerns of plot and resolution...his narrative is centered on the ruptures in his main characters’ lives and their consequences. ...All Days Are Night recuperates one of the biggest themes any novelist can tackle with austere, formal brilliance." —Financial Times

"Stamm...gives this well-worn set-up real energy...His prose, in a crystalline translation by Michael Hofmann, is as sharply illuminating as a surgical light. ...A profound and mysterious book." —The Economist

"Stamm transmutes turmoil into form." —The Times Literary Supplement

"Brilliantly translated by Michael Hofmann...Stamm perceives that grief is insane and horrifying, a nightmare that does not need to be emphasised." —Literary Review

"A brilliant, bruising tale of shattered lives." —The Independent

“In a moment, our lives can change, our identities can vanish; if we are to live, we must re-form ourselves. In his elegantly-written and profound new novel, Peter Stamm investigates and tracks how one such self is reconfigured with scraps of an old life while moving-by-feel into a new one. With beautiful clarity, realism and compassion, All Days are Night takes us deep into a psyche-in-transition; the result is a revelatory novel that probes our most closely-held assumptions about how to live in this world.” —Michelle Huneven, author of Off Course

"Everything Peter Stamm turns his hand to is highly disturbing, acutely perceptive, and unfathomably gripping, and All Days Are Night is no exception. In sentences that are plain and surgical, in prose that has about it a disquieting stillness, he dissects our fractured lives. A masterpiece of disorientation and control, All Days Are Night may be his best novel yet." —Rupert Thomson, award-winning author of The Insult and This Party's Got to Stop

"All Days Are Night is a gracious variation on a bitter theme, and one in which the author's clarity of style comes to seem part of the cure: like a balsam, it soothes the characters' sufferings, and helps them back into their lives." —Spiegel Online

"Stamm keeps his tenderly misanthropic gaze riveted on his unhappy protagonists. He is like a gentler version of the young Houellebecq." —Hans-Peter Kunisch, Süddeutsche Zeitung

"Stamm is somehow able to imbue his accounts of ordinary lives and universal frustrations with such tension that the books become unputdownable." —Felicitas von Lovenberg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“A book that makes life seem worth living again.” —Denis Scheck, ARD

"A delicate variation on a bitter theme—[Stamm's] linguistic clarity is instrumental in this story of salvation. With the power of a restorative it brings the characters back to life" —Der Spiegel

"Haunting and wonderfully consoling." —Cosmopolitan Germany

"Astonishing... [Stamm], with his agile mind and his receptiveness to contemporary trends, has once more succeeded in depicting the zeitgeist with an astounding precision." —Weltwoche

"Stamm produces writing of psychological acuity and great intensity." —Saechsische Zeitung 

Praise for Seven Years:

“Seven Years is a novel to make you doubt your own dogma. What more can a novel do than that?” —Zadie Smith, Harper’s Magazine

“With a patient and impressive commitment to realism, this Swiss novel follows the course of a complicated, troubled marriage…Though Stamm pulls off a quietly spectacular plot twist halfway through the book, he never loses sight of the quotidian things that erode or transform relationships over time.” —New Yorker

“Stamm’s cleverness is to align a spareness that works in translation with his characters’ instinctive fear of all things rich and intense. Lean as it is, his prose is wonderfully ‘literary’ in its fine integration of voice and story. The constant disorientation of his characters, their sense that their lives are interchangeable with any number of other lives, seem peculiarly suited to this era of globalization.” —Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books

“Stamm is a master of quietly deliberative stories. In Seven Years, as in the best of his work, he puts often simple-seeming characters through extraordinary paces, all the more remarkable given the Carver-like restraint he exercises in his writing.” —Bookforum

From the Publisher

09/15/2014
Told from the viewpoint of television presenter Gillian and an artist named Hubert, this latest from award-winning Swiss novelist Stamm (We're Flying) opens with Gillian in the hospital recovering from a car accident that left her face severely disfigured and her husband, Matthias, dead. During her extended rehabilitation, Gillian reflects on her marriage and how her relationship with Hubert, begun after she interviewed him on TV, may have affected the tragedy. Unfortunately, Gillian and Hubert's sections of the book have the same flat, distant, third-person style, and the failure to distinguish their voices limits the reader's engagement with the story. VERDICT The novel is a quick but forgettable read with the exception of the conclusion, which is memorable for all the wrong reasons. In need of an epiphany, Stamm creates an unbelievable set piece that will disappoint readers. Recommended for those interested in art and the art of reinvention; book clubs may wish to debate the ending.—Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Library Journal

2014-10-08
A slim novel filled with big ideas about art and identity.The Swiss author's bloodless minimalism works better in his elliptical short stories (We're Flying, 2012, etc.) than it does in longer work, where even a short novel can feel ponderous with its lack of narrative momentum. The plot points here are few, though to reveal their progression might spoil the reader's discovery. Much of the book takes place inside the head of Gillian, who is initially immobile in a hospital, wondering how she got there. A car accident has left her face unrecognizably disfigured and her husband, the drunken driver, dead. An aspiring actress who instead became a television journalist—which she considers a different sort of acting—Gillian had made a living and found an identity with her face. So who is she now? "It was conceivable that one day there would be a person with a different face, who would be her. But there was as little connecting her to that person as to the other one she had been before the accident." As the novel plays with chronology, much of the first section features pre-accident flashbacks—to the marriage that had become both tense and routine, to her TV show, and in particular to an interview with an artist who made paintings from photos he took of a wide variety of women who posed naked for him. Later, "[h]e saw the possibilities of [Gillian's] face, not so much its beauty as its variety, the many faces that were contained in it." By this point, the novel has shifted its perspective to inside the artist's consciousness. It's six years later, and Gillian has a new face, a new career, a new name. Way too coincidentally, the two have reconnected. Way too portentously, she asks him, "That's a frightening thought, isn't it, that you're capable of killing someone with your art." The novel somehow ends on a note of redemption but without resolution.

Kirkus Reviews