Just finished reading "Seven Years" a dark, sober novel by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm. The premise sounds ordinary, a man who betrays his wife with another woman, but the circumstances and the characters are described with such precision that everything becomes fresh and interesting. If you're a writer it's a brilliant example, I think, of how to manage time -- the story takes place over many, many years, but it's not a long book at all -- in a compressed way, and how to create the feel of real life, with work and vacations and children and disasters and triumphs, around the core of the narrative. I'm reading it again, and it's astonishing to realize how nearly every sentence contributes to the larger purpose. The characters, especially the husband's homely and religiously devout Polish immigrant lover, are haunting.
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