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.
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..
Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is .
When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him.
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.
I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms, writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying , her anarchically comic debut.
I don\'t see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial--a kind of architecture.
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
