Ariane Koch, Overstaying
Dorothy (US) / Pushkin Press (UK), 2024
“Overstaying amazed me.” — Jonathan Lethem
In Ariane Koch’s anarchically comic debut, an impudent young contemporary Bartleby is living alone in nine rooms of her parents’ old ten-room house, in a small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave, when a visitor turns up. She takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it’s hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant and unexpected directions.
“I don’t see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms.” — Ariane Koch
“Overstaying is a short novel of huge ambition. Much of its beauty lies in its arresting use of language, the unruly juxtaposition of images that ought not to cohere but somehow do, jolting us from our complacency towards a more vital understanding of the world. Damion Searls’s translation is lucid and precise… Hypnotic and masterly, this is a book that creates its own world, forcing us to look at our own through altered eyes.” — Nina Allen, TLS
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5
“How do you deal with a house-guest who eats your socks?
Overstaying becomes a bizarre and beautiful psychodrama about hospitality, control and domination… that seems to take place half in the ‘real world’ and half in a Leonora Carrington painting… It is a joy to read. It’s tautly written, caustically witty, and replete with imaginative insights. I’m already excited to read Koch’s second book; she is so perceptive, convincing and poised a writer that it makes you feel grateful that such a talent shares your world.” — Luke Kennard, The Telegraph
“So many novels have been written about immigration—what it means to leave home and install oneself in a foreign land, what it means to be left behind—that you might think there’s nothing more to say. But then you read Overstaying, [which] takes these themes and transforms them into a strange, brilliant fever dream. [The book] ought to outlast the current conversation about these issues. Given its intelligence, humour and originality, there’s no doubt it will.” — Niamh Donnelly, Financial Times
“An eccentric, wry voice, … tempered by a darkness that bleeds slowly through the pages… It both welcomes and distances the reader, which is a rare feat and may be why the book won prizes in Germany and in Koch’s home country of Switzerland. If there’s any justice, it should do the same here.” — John Self, The Critic
“Overstaying has the makings of a classic.” — Die Zeit