From the opening paragraph, Peter Stamm’s To the Back of Beyond is mysterious and mesmerizing … The book moves smoothly between [Thomas’s] point of view and Astrid’s, so skillfully that this inexplicable adventure seems completely plausible. Thomas hikes through forests and up mountains, sleeping rough, foraging for food, occasionally finding shelter. He knows where he is headed, although we do not … Stamm’s pivot halfway through the book is masterful: The story opens up, moving forward and backward in time almost simultaneously. The outcome becomes murky, but Stamm’s control never wavers.
As always, Stamm sets up the psychological territory with such quiet precision that the reader succumbs at once: it must be true … Not to spoil it, let’s simply say that, between mountain misadventures, police investigations and strange scramblings of chronology, Stamm finds a way to draw his characters’ sense of being divided between different lives into the very structure of the book, creating two quite separate dimensions for husband and wife, to the point that it is sometimes difficult to understand whether the woman we are reading about, waiting years and years like some latter-day Penelope for her husband’s return, is no more than Thomas’s fantasy … Whatever the case, it’s clear that only Stamm could have dreamed up such a plot, and only he could have pulled it off. It is his genius and his burden.
Stamm isn’t interested in the why of Thomas’s walkabout, which he takes for granted as being, if not inevitable, then at least as possible as the alternative. Thomas opens the gate; he walks down the road; he keeps going … One month after Thomas disappears, there is a twist in the plot. It is masterfully timed, arriving exactly when the narrative has become arid. It didn’t make me care about Thomas — nothing could — but it complicates matters, and makes us see Astrid differently. Both of them, it is clear, are in thrall to fantasies — one dreams about slipping the ties of responsibility, the other about seamlessly restoring what has been broken. That Stamm treats these as distinctly male and female is predictable, and, frankly, annoying.
Why does he walk away? Nobody seems sure, not him, not his wife, Astrid, not the reader. There is not a lot of interior voice in the passages that describe Thomas’ journey through the woods, valleys, and Alpine mountain peaks, just descriptions of the terrain, the villages he passes through, and the abandoned vacation homes where he spends the night … The straightforward exposition casts a fairytale-like spell that is occasionally marred by awkward translation, especially for the American audience … The prose is so even-toned and mild-mannered, the story can easily slip by without making much of an impression.
In these opening sections Stamm plays with tense, beginning in the conditional (‘When Astrid realized that Thomas wasn’t lying beside her, she would suppose he was already up’) before shifting to the simple past (‘Konrad asked, Where’s Papa?’). This temporal device complicates the veracity of the narrative: are we observing how each character imagines the other’s actions, or what they are ‘really’ doing? The exact reason for his departure remains a mystery to Thomas and the reader … In Michael Hoffman’s translation, Stamm’s prose has a hypnotic quality … If the rigours of the unsettling form that Stamm has devised limit his freedom to dramatise his characters, this high-wire act between sentimentality and nihilism is nevertheless an ingenious and beautiful creation.
Stamm’s superb descriptions of alpine nature and internal human conflict (Thomas, wandering through the Alps, often reflects on his wife and family fondly but doesn’t want to return home) are aided by Hofmann’s excellent translation. Even when Thomas’s actions cause pain for those he has promised to love, his introspection makes his impulse to walk away from everything less condemnable. This is a moving work about freedom and wanting.
