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Seven Years

Seven Years

by Michael Hofmann (Translator), PeterStamm (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2012

    $14.89
Synopsis

Alex has spent the majority of his adult life torn between two very different women-and he can't make up his mind. Sonia, his wife and business partner, is everything a man would want. Intelligent, beautiful, charming, and ambitious, she worked tirelessly alongside him to open their architecture firm and to build a life of luxury. But when the seven-year itch sets in, their exhaustion at working long hours coupled with their failed attempts at starting a family get the best of them. Alex soon finds himself kindling an affair with his college lover, Ivona. The young Polish woman who worked in a Catholic mission is the polar opposite of Sonia: dull, passive, taciturn, and plain. Despite having little in common with Ivona, Alex is inexplicably drawn to her while despising himself for it. Torn between his highbrow marriage and his lowbrow affair, Alex is stuck within a spiraling threesome. But when Ivona becomes pregnant, life takes an unexpected turn, and Alex is puzzled more than ever by the mysteries of his heart. Peter Stamm, one of Switzerland's most acclaimed writers, is at his best exploring the complexities of human relationships. Seven Years is a distinct, sobering, and bold novel about the impositions of happiness in the quest for love.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 272
 Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 05 Apr 2012
ISBN 10: 1847085091
ISBN 13: 9781847085092

Media Reviews
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 Stamm's talent is palpable, but what makes him a writer to read, and read often, is the way he renders contemporary life as a series of ruptures. Never entirely sure of their position, his characters engage in a constant effort to establish their equilibrium. -- New York Times Book Review 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. -- The New York Review of Books 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: an oddly personal disagreement about the merits of 'Rain Man', or the 'piles of romance novels, Christian manuals, and Polish magazines' that crowd a lover's apartment. -- The New Yorker Stamm is a master of quietly deliberative stories. In Seven Years, as in the best of his work, he puts often simple-seeming character through extraordinary paces, all the more remarkable given the Carver-like restraint he exercises in his writing. -- Bookforum Seven Years is a powerful, enlightening novel about the eternal search for contentment in life, the often fickle nature of love, and the knowledge that in reality, happiness is rarely how we dreamed it would be. -- The Daily Beast Here is Stamm's strength, in a good English translation, the clean uncluttered senten
Author Bio
Peter Stamm was born in 1963 and now lives in Winterthur, Switzerland. His prize-winning books have been translated into twenty languages.