A Postmodern Riff on Thomas Mann
Peter Stamm’s All Days Are Night follows two characters in search of a cure.
Stamm’s two protagonists are, or rather were, well launched in the lesser orbits of 21st-century cultural celebrityhood. Gillian hosted a television interview show that featured buzz-generating authors and artists. Among her guests was Hubert, a painter with a risqué strategy for finding models: he stopped women on the street and asked to photograph them nude. But both Gillian and Hubert have been haunted by feelings of being impostors, and sudden crises upend their careers and lives. Can they help rescue each other?
In Stamm’s fiction, there is no rom-com resolution. But when his characters retreat to a provincial Alpine resort town, a world away from their former, culturally jaded haunts, he reveals farce as well as high seriousness in their quest. (“Do I have to warn the local women about you, or not?” is all the interviewer from the town newspaper really wants to know from Hubert.) These souls in search of a cure suffer from a very contemporary disease: a dread of autonomy mixed with a yearning for authenticity. Try to imagine a postmodern riff on The Magic Mountain: Stamm’s slim novel pulls off that feat.