Overstaying

By: Ariane Koch

Published by New York Review of Books, 2024-09-17

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 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,” 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.