Overstaying

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Winner of the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force. “I don't see my writing a s chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms,” writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the 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 is 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. Show more