Ariane Koch
OVERSTAYING
Ariane Koch’s surreal novel “Overstaying” reflects on the moralities of generosity with outlandish imagination and dreamlike prose.
“I’m very interested in absurd moments and motifs. I believe that, like humor, the surreal has the great power to make statements about the real.”
By Prathap Nair
In a remote town in the mountainous Swiss countryside, an intrepid young woman encounters a stranger. The woman, herself a loner who lives in her parents’ old house has tried to leave the town she lives in because she seems to despise it earnestly. The stranger’s sight evokes a sense of nurturing protectiveness in her: “Anyone as delicate as the visitor is in grave danger. How easily he might end up in the clutches of some crazy person,” she thinks. She takes pity on the stranger and brings him home.
So begins Ariane Koch’s unsettling tale Overstaying. It unspools in pithy chapters, in stream-of-consciousness style, complicating the relationship between the stranger - called only as visitor - and a nameless narrator. The book’s larger, overarching themes are migration, nationalism, extremism, and what counts as overstaying one’s welcome as an unwelcome stranger. Koch says the idea for the novel came to her at the peak of Europe’s so-called refugee crisis in 2016.
Unsurprisingly, as the stranger moves in and takes over the living space of the nameless narrator, cracks slowly begin to appear in the newly formed relationship. Things spiral and regret starts to coalesce as the stranger’s behavior suggests to the narrator that he is slowly staking ownership of the house. Not forcefully, perhaps. But by simply claiming liberties – throwing a party, smoking non-stop etc. – as an unruly house guest. “The crisis concerning the visitor’s presence slosh over me, cold and unstoppable,” she writes. “Before, this place was a home, now it's a hovel. The yard is a disaster area.”
Frustrated by these liberties the stranger affords himself; she restricts the living arrangements. She installs a large lock on the front door and hides all the telephones. She locks out all prospective guests and writes down the new house rules in her “Holy Book”. However, the guest seems to break them anyway. The existential push and pull between the narrator and the visitor form the crux of Koch’s novel Overstaying - its mysterious central character holding court with absurdist and whimsical observations.
Has the visitor overstayed his welcome? What happens to someone who gets unceremoniously kicked out from what they thought would be their new home? These questions reverberate through Koch’s slender, yet formidable novel. While the German version of the novel “Die Aufdrängung” won the Swiss Literature Award in 2022 and the Aspekte-Literaturpreis in 2021, the English version, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Independent Presses in the USA and Canada earlier this year.
In riotously imaginative and brooding prose, Swiss writer Ariane Koch’s Overstaying is brought to life from German by an incisively sharp-eyed translation by Damion Searls. Koch’s Overstaying dares to question the facetious moralities of generosity and the underlying nationalism that often overpowers it. Koch, who teaches at the Institute for Aesthetic Practice and Theory at the Basel School of Art and Design, gave us a glimpse into her thought process and how Overstaying came about.
Ariane, tell us about what inspired you to create brooding and marginally self-
destructive narrator and the visitor in your novel. How did they come to
you?
In the beginning, I was interested in hospitality and the philosophical meaning of
the guest. At the time in 2016, I was a frequent guest myself, and it was also the year
of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe. I was interested in the fact that the guest
can stand for many things, both privately and politically. The narrator was initially a
“we” and only gradually during writing became an “I”. I tried to thematize the social
way of speaking about the foreign by constantly projecting onto a guest who, however, does not get a chance to speak for himself.
The narrator still lives in her childhood home in the same village. Is it fair to say that you have taken the principles of a Bildungsroman but created an anti-bildungsroman where the narrator doesn’t want to grow up?
Yes, I find that an interesting thesis! I have always also thought of the book as an
anti-Heimatroman because, although it thematizes nationalism, it simultaneously rejects it. (The German literary genre of Heimatroman visualizes pastoral landscapes and features characters and their deep rootedness to the countryside.) In the end it’s the so-called other or unknown (the guest) who helps the narrator to finally transform and move away.
The narrator talks about the visitor being her scientific experiment - this adds to the feeling that you are teasing out elements of gothic literature, over and above the other surreal aspects of the book. Tell us about how you added these layers to the narrative / narrator.
This may not just have to do with this text, but with my writing in general. I’m fascinated by absurd moments and motifs. I believe that, like humor, the surreal has the immense power to make statements about the real. For me, many images and formulations have become worn out (in media) so that their meaningfulness fades.
The surreal, on the other hand, allows me to create new meanings and contribute to
debates.
Who were your literary inspirations and who were you reading when you were
writing the novel?
If you read closely, I think you can sense the presence of the writings of Jean Paul, Donatella Di Cesare, Siri Hustvedt, Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard and Mikhail Bulgakov most in.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Basel in 1988, she studied fine arts and interdisciplinarity in Basel and Bern. Koch is the author of theater, performance, radio play, and prose texts, as well as a lecturer at the Institute for Art and Design Education at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel. Her debut novel Die Aufdrängung [2021] was awarded the aspekte Literature Prize and the Swiss Literature Prize.