Publisher description for On a day like this : a novel / Peter Stamm ; translated by Michael Hofmann.
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On a day like any other, Andreas changes his life. When a routine doctor’s visit leads to an unexpected prognosis, a great yearning takes hold of him–but who can tell if it is homesickness or wanderlust; a deathwish or a fresh lease on life? Andreas leaves everything behind–sells his Paris apartment, cuts off all social ties, quits his teaching job, and waves good-bye to his days spent idly sitting in cafe;s–to look for a woman he loved half a lifetime ago. The monotony of days had been keeping him in check; now he hopes for a miracle and for a new beginning.
Andreas’s 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, continues to visit the same lake they once swam in together. Andreas, 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, Stamm’s unobtrusive observational style allows us to journey with our antihero through his crises of banality, of living in his empty world, to the realization that life is finite–that one must live it, as long as that is possible.
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