The Swiss author Peter Stamm (Agnes; In a Deep Blue Hour) is something of an unofficial laureate of isolation, writing of characters who either are dedicated autophiles who prefer solitude or are reluctantly alone due to happenstance. Translated by Michael Hofmann, the nine stories in the magnificent collection On Thin Ice explore various forms of isolation and protagonists' efforts either to ease their pain or increase their insularity. Results are mixed.
Stamm's opening piece, "Lieke writes," is the story of a Swiss teacher who has gone to Germany to be a ski instructor and escape an unspecified legal proceeding--"After the police questioning," he says, "I just left. Just get away, as far away as possible"--and the friendship he strikes up at the resort with a Dutch woman dealing with her own loneliness. "Mars" is about a teenager who is so entranced by Mars One, the Dutch firm that wanted to land humans on the planet, that he builds a "mother craft" in his parents' basement and plans to stay there "for almost seven months in complete isolation, without contact, without conversation, without sunshine," to emulate the mission. His mother finds his scheme "batty" but it instills in his father "a fresh sense of the earth, as though seeing it through his eyes."
The collection's centerpiece is the two-part title story. An actress who yearns for a career in the theater must accept work at a hospital, where she simulates patient symptoms for doctors in training. The backstory of the character she plays--married to a bank manager, enduring the death of a child--reverberates in her own life as she develops a friendship with one of the trainees. Other stories include "Jump and Run," in which a woman opts to leave her husband and kids to join the army as part of peacekeeping forces "to get away from my life, to have a bit of an experience"; and "Elin's Apples," in which a high-powered businesswoman who says "time was running away from me" feels strangely drawn to the solitude of an unheated shack "improvised from wood planks and fiberboard," where a lone woman sells apples, potatoes, and pumpkins to passersby.
Stamm has always been a beguilingly unflashy writer, with stripped-down prose that makes the exposure of raw emotions all the more lethal. He's as perceptive and empathetic as ever in this excellent work. -- Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer
Shelf Talker: Peter Stamm's collection On Thin Ice contains nine magnificent stories that highlight various forms of isolation among his diverse protagonists, written with his characteristic stripped-down prose.