“Glück malt man mit Punkten, Unglück mit Strichen” Peter Stamms Roman Agnes

Abstract

The first novel Agnes by the Swiss author Peter Stamm, published in 1998, attracted considerable attention. It relates, in an aesthetically subtle manner, a modern love-story which demonstrates the deep conflict between reality and fiction and, at the same time, the power of literature. The love affair between the first-person narrator, a Swiss non-fiction author who researches de luxe railway cars in Chicago, and Agnes, a twenty-five-year-old American doctoral student of physics, develops into an aesthetic question concerning the extent to which happiness can be described. – The present contribution examines in detail the literary divergence between imagination and reality which becomes evident in the love-story written down by the first-person narrator. It analyzes the reasons for the narrative experience of the failure of happiness. (HV; In German)