The English title of Peter Stamm’s fourth novel comes from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 43”, when the poet is proclaiming that his days are sombre without his beloved. At the start the protagonist, Gillian, the host of a cultural TV show, feels that her life, too, has been plunged into darkness, as a result of a car accident in which her husband has been killed and her beautiful face disfigured.
Her mind drifts back to events leading up to the accident. Mathias, her husband, had discovered a reel of film containing nude images of Gillian taken by an artist, Hubert. A fierce argument ensued and both had become drunk. Gillian, who had meant to drive home, let Mathias do so, and now blames herself for the accident.
The book is divided into three sections. The first follows Gillian’s life in the aftermath of the accident. In the second, it is six years later and the focus has switched to Hubert, who is to put on an exhibition at a mountain resort. He and Gillian, now calling herself Jill and working in the resort, reconnect. The third part, prefixed by a quote from Ernst Bloch, the Marxist philosopher, about the importance of living (not merely existing), shows Jill deciding to do just that.
Stamm’s prose is, as in his previous work, matter-of-fact and deadpan, imbuing Gillian’s time in hospital with a steely power. Her deformed appearance is so alien that she feels as if her former self is dead. Stamm potently conveys the paradoxes of sudden, devastating injury: the brisk professionalism of doctors and nurses; the longing to escape hospital but the helplessness after discharge.
The lucidity of Stamm’s writing contrasts with the complexity of his characters, who are conflicted and driven by desires that they often don’t understand. Stamm doesn’t analyse their emotions, he baldly depicts actions and leaves readers to disentangle motives. In this, he has similarities with Gerbrand Bakker and Helle Helle, whose protagonists are as opaque their creators’ writing is clear.
All Days Are Night has echoes of several of Stamm’s previous works. Gillian asks Hubert to paint her, much as the eponymous protagonist of Stamm’s Agnes asks her lover to write about her. It’s as if the representations will render them more real. Gillian is repelled by Hubert’s pursuit of naked women as models, yet attracted to him because of this worldliness; the disparity between rationality and desire is similar to that in Seven Years, in which a man is repulsed yet simultaneously turned on by a woman whom he degrades. Stamm has a penchant not only for flawed characters, but also for ones who engineer their own destruction. But there is also humour in this story. Stamm gently pokes fun at the art world, with its lecherous and voyeuristic men, and the presentation of ordinary objects as art almost a century after Duchamp’s urinal.
Michael Hofmann’s translation is magnificent. He maintains the spare poetry in Stamm’s prose: Gillian’s pain is “a fireworks of stabbings”; Hubert’s studio exudes “a chill, garish light”. In laying bare his characters’ vulnerability and illogical behaviour, Stamm renders the lives of the ordinary as fascinating as the studies of any anthropologist.
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