Overstaying

By: Ariane Koch

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Synopsis: 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.