A Man Just Left His House...

 

One man called Thomas, after spending a relatively successful holiday with his family - wife and two children - went out of the door of his house and disappear, with no traces. Well, actually he left some traces, some credit card payment his wife will discover a couple of days after: he paid in a brothel, at some restaurant, a motel, a sport store. 

His wife, Astrid, is at the beginning worried, she is asking the help of the police, tries herself to find him, by tracing his account operations, but in the end, she gives up and shortly will made a proper funeral for him. 20 years after, the children are fine, with a relatively stable social and financial situation. Astrid is also fine. As for Thomas, he keeps running around Europe, got a fake ID and never returned to his previous life in Switzerland.

Peter Stamm is considered one of the most successful Swiss writers. He writes in German - I´ve read Weit über das Land (in English translation, To the Back of Beyond) in the original version - and is multi-awarded. I wanted to add his books for a long time to my reading shelf but maybe starting with this book was not a great idea - it was a random choice, based on the availability at my local library. 

In full honesty, although I liked the writing - minimalistic, concise - the execution was largely inadequate. The fact that a man left his family and never come back is not something extraordinary. That he kept wandering from a place to another, thinking and working only for himself, is also relatively common. But besides some outburst of awareness from Astrid, there is hardly any serious chain of events that may make this runaway better, special, outstanding, unique...than any other similar story you can read in the yellow press.

The book is short and can be an useful companion for those looking to improve their German vocabulary, but was largely deceived by its literary approach. There are lots of topics that can be discussed or implied in such situations, but Astrid and Thomas rather lived from a day to another, a cartoonish kind of life, that the writer himself seems to be tired and bored to tell it. Half through the book the story is hurried up to the end - which is not as bad, actually - but this run towards the end made the book even more superficial.

In short, would try to read another title by Stamm, maybe another time. As for now, it helped my vocabulary but was a displeasant - read boring - reading experience.

Rating: 2 stars