Desirous of Indifference: On Peter Stamm’s “The Archive of Feelings”

The Archive of Feelings by Peter Stamm IN A 2017 INTERVIEW with The White Review , Peter Stamm remembered a “special cookie” he loved as a child. As the Swiss novelist explained: “I had the feeling that wanting these cookies so much weakened me. So I bought a whole packet and ate all of it at once, hoping I wouldn’t like them anymore afterwards. I wanted to be indifferent to them.” Stamm’s plan failed. As he told the Review , these days he’s “a bit less strict” when it comes to “earthly pleasures.” But something about the experience clearly stuck with the writer, as a similar desire for indifference pervades the 13 books he has published over the course of his three-decade career. Often, Stamm’s hyperisolated protagonists operate under thick veneers of apathy as they desperately—almost pathologically—try to avoid feelings of any kind. They live life as passive observers rather than active participants; “it’s as though I hadn’t ever really been alive, just watched others in their lives, and waited for something to happen,” relates the unnamed narrator in Stamm’s latest novel, The Archive of Feelings (2023). Translated into English by Michael Hofmann, the book centers on a middle-aged hermit who spends his days diligently working a job for which he is no longer paid. A longtime archivist at a press agency, he once became so immersed in his work that he convinced his company to move their mountain of paper files to the basement of his late mother’s home. The novel opens five years after the narrator has lost his job to computerization, yet he continues to update the archive daily with fresh news clippings, reflecting, “I don’t know what else I would do with my time.” Following his firing, the narrator distanced himself from his small cadre of acquaintances (they could hardly be called friends). By now, his love life has all but disappeared, and he has sacrificed any semblance of a social, even corporeal existence in favor of sustaining an entirely imagined relationship with Franziska, an old flame–turned-pop sensation he hasn’t spoken to in 30 years. […]

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