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Peter Stamm: Agnes (Agnes)

Our unnamed hero is a Swiss writer. He had written fiction but is now livng in Chicago and writing a book about US luxury trains. He regularly goes to the library for his research. It is there that he meets Agnes who is doing research on the symmetries of crystal structures. We know from the very first page that they will be together for nine months and that she will die at the end of this period killed by a story.

When they met she was twenty-five and played the cello. She had also told him that she was not very sociable.

They talk on the library steps and have coffee together , He eventually invites her to dinner. Ominously, he sees a dead woman on the street on his way to the restaurant. During the dinner she will say I’m afraid of death. It’s not dying I’m afraid of, it’s death.. After the dinner they go to his apartment and have sex. She claims that it is the first time for her.

They both seem to have mild obsession with disappearing. She mentions forests; he sees small clusters of houses from a train which makes him they would be a good place to disappear. Neither seems to have any real friends.

She decides to write a story but he is very critical of it but then he admits he may well have stopped writing because he just was not good enough. When he tells her that a previous girlfriend broke up with him because she recognised herself in one of his stories, Agnes asks him to write a story about her. We might both be disappointed he says but she is prepared to take the chance.

He starts writing the story but, not surprisingly , she does not always approve of his characterisation of her.

However, he gets into it and abandons his luxury trains book to focus on writing her story. One perhaps obvious result is that he find that they each remember things differently.
He is now more in love with her. When she was with me, I felt intoxicated, and everything around me, like the air and the light, seemed painfully clear and close.
However he now also feels that she is his creation as he writes not only about her as she is in the present but how he imagines her in the future. I felt the new freedom lend wings to my imagination. I planned her future for her, the way a father would plan his daughter’s

She now moves in with him and, to the annoyance of his publisher, has more or less abandoned his train book.

She has a Halloween party at her college, apparently a big annual event and she wants him to go. He does not want to go and his excuse is a more sedate Halloween party organised by Amtrak which he claims is necessary for his book but he will join her later. It is there that he meets Louise, a half French, half American woman who works for Pullman Leasing also relevant to his book, though she describes Americans as savages,decadent savages.

However back with Agnes, she says that the pill failed and she is pregnant. He is not the first man to says I don’t want a baby. What would I want a baby for? He storms off and when he returns, she has gone, taking her things.

He writes in the Agnes story that he accepts the baby but does not tell her though he does see Louise. He stalks her for a while and then gets a call from one of her friends that he should visit her and he finds she has had a miscarriage. They get back together and he tells her that he would agree to her having a baby.

However she tells him that as she has been unable to produce a baby, he must do so in his story and soon they have a literary baby and soon it (its sex is initially not given but we soon learn that she is called Margaret) can walk and talk and the grandparents get to meet her. They marry, have another child.

Agnes gets carried away and then goes and buys real clothes and toys for Margaret but that does not work out well.

He finishes the story but neither of them is happy with the ending. Life doesn’t go in for endings, it goes on. Then he writes an alternative ending but while he is out at a New Year’s party with Louise – Agnes claims that she is too unwell to go – she finds this ending on his computer.

This is a strange novel not least because the basic theme becomes the idea that you can change your life and, indeed, the life of others by writing a story about them. Of course, many people have been influenced by reading a work of fiction but because it has influenced them and may, to some degree, reflect their life even if it is not their actual life. There have also, of course, been stories where a real character recognises themselves in a character and the author knows them and uses them as a model. This happens in this book where our narrator had written a story and his then girlfriend recognised herself in the story and broke off their relationship as a result. However I suspect it is not very common for a story in progress to change the life of a real person and it is this idea that makes this novel so interesting.

Publishing history

First published in 1998 by Arche Verla
First published in English in 2000 by Bloomsbury
Translated by Michael Hofmann