Ariane Koch, Overstaying
Dorothy (US) / Pushkin Press (UK), 2024
In Ariane Koch’s anarchically comic debut, winner of the aspekte prize in Germany, the narrator is an impudent young contemporary Bartleby 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, promisingly new, 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 a set of contradictions, 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
“Overstaying has the makings of a classic.” — Die Zeit