{"id":517147,"date":"2023-03-28T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=517147"},"modified":"2023-11-11T21:59:49","modified_gmt":"2023-11-11T20:59:49","slug":"the-simple-desire-to-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/literature\/the-simple-desire-to-last\/","title":{"rendered":"The simple desire to last"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between humor and tenderness, Peter Stamm has produced a singular, intensely human novel, polished by the memory of love and the anxiety of living in a world that is changing too fast.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The attraction of opposites<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

She's Franziska, a former successful variety singer known as Fabienne, who has spent her life moving from one stage to the next, always on the move and singing, singing Barbara from time to time, often infatuated and in love, once with a footballer, once with her producer, another time with a stranger. She burned life at both ends. He is the narrator, a hardened loner, unemployed bachelor and former archivist at a newspaper where he catalogued, filed and labeled press clippings. Until the day when, because the world was changing, the iconographic department became the documentation department, and then nothing. He prefers to work in the shadows rather than among the crowds, seeking to classify the world in the shelter of his own home, rather than creating something, rather than going out, because when he's outside, he feels ill and borrowed. His cellar, adapted for the occasion, covered with archives of all kinds, mobile shelving and rails, all bought out of his own pocket from the company where he used to work, becomes his watchtower from which he recalls and observes his memories pass by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She's all movement, he's all stillness. They met as children, on the way home from school. They got to know each other. That's when they fell in love. They kept in touch even after higher education, one never forgetting the other, even if the narrator remained more in love with Franziska, for several decades, unilaterally, with a love that resists the passage of time, like his conception of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00abI go into the room where no one but my parents has ever slept. The beds are still made, as if they could come back any day. It may sound crazy, but I'm not crazy. I just don't want anything to change, and that's no crime. Resisting the passage of time, not letting myself be carried away by the flood of transformations. It's my impression that I live in my memories as I do in this house, in an eternal present where nothing disappears, where everything gradually fades, dusts up, dissolves.\u00bb<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The simple desire to last<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Peter Stamm's simple, poetic writing is sprinkled with a gentle melancholy, and the narrator constantly questions himself, opening the drawers of his life to understand his past and himself, oscillating between his childhood, his adolescence and his first job, always focusing on his relationship with Franziska, with whom he remains simply in love. Here, Peter Stamm shows us all the power of a simple love that lasts, and reopens this fundamentally literary question: can we love forever?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n