Cover image of Overstaying by Ariane Koch (Dorothy Project, 2024)
The places we’ve lived are sites of memory, places we can revisit time and again without using a door. I’ve often gone back and visited the home I grew up in, though I haven’t set foot inside since my family left it three decades ago. Instead, I can feel the pink shag bedroom carpet pressing into my face whenever I experience the shame of rejection; the rubber doorstop in the hall bathroom mocking me each time I stub my toe.
Eventually, though, I leave, come back to the present, and move on with my day.
In The Poetics of Space (1957), Gaston Bachelard argues that “a house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” Our homes, our pasts, then, can exist outside of traditional space and time, giving us the luxury of easy access in and out. But what happens if we get stuck? What happens when we can’t bring ourselves to leave?
In Overstaying (Dorothy Project, 2024), the first novel written by the Swiss playwright Ariane Koch (and translated from the German by Damion Searls), the home, the site of memory and remembering, is made literal. When we meet the unnamed narrator, she is living in the same town where she was born, in the same house where she grew up, a place she is desperate to leave but cannot seem to get away from.
She is trapped within a space that, given the surreal imagery and dreamlike language of the novel, presents as both a literal and figurative place of self-imposed detention. “With my back on the sofa’s armrest, I imagine it as the wall of a sarcophagus; I’m trapped inside it, true, but still it’s a perfectly adequate enclosure for me.” As a site of all that is holding her back, the house becomes the thing that must be overcome. But it’s not something she can do on her own.
Enter a visitor.
Appearing in town, he does not ask to be taken in, but the narrator offers him the one empty room of nine within her home, hoping that “a little of his having left would spill over onto me and flush me out of town like a giant wave.” Described in both human and animal terms, the visitor has an absurdness about him—he is talkative, has a bespectacled gaze, and wears a poncho. His hands are described both as claws and as “brushfingers.” He sniffs around the house, eats tangerines, and wails in his sleep. He is, in many ways, a collection of images, and it matters little if he is, in fact, human, animal, or just an imagined presence. He will still need to fit within this house, which is full of the physical and psychological baggage the narrator’s accumulated throughout her life.
At first, his presence has a positive impact on his host. He improves her reputation with neighbors, who have been after her to open up her empty room for some time. He makes perfect coffee. He pitches in with chores. Soon, however, his habits wear on her, and she starts to feel he is making himself too comfortable. “I wonder if it’s in the realm of the possible for someone to fuse with or melt into a sofa to the point where you can’t tell whether that someone is a visitor or a sofa.”
Midway through the novel, we begin to get sections featuring a syntactical shift that aligns with the narrator’s descent into frustration and disorientation. For several pages the narrator delivers line after line beginning with the same introductory phrase:
Since the visitor’s arrival, I’ve started baking, but I’m going to stop again, because when it comes right down to it I’m not a housewife and have no intention of becoming one, even if I do own and/or rent a house.
Since the visitor’s arrival, the house has been doing very badly.
Since the visitor’s arrival, the facade has been crumbling and in fact the entire property has been shrinking.
Since the visitor’s arrival, I’ve been losing rooms in the house like earrings; I look for them everywhere yet I cannot find them.
By getting on the narrator’s nerves, the visitor forces her to reconsider her relationship to her home and to her own self. It’s as if a door has been opened, and it’s time to leave.
Koch’s prose takes us through a maze of logic, but keeps us grounded with repetitive images of the stuff she’s accumulated. Scenes featuring the narrator’s collection of broken vacuum cleaners and the graves she has dug for dead goldfish are interspersed with memories of her own childhood, pushing the boundaries of what we consider a traditional plot structure.
When the narrator says, “I sometimes feel really disappointed, about how our minds always seek out what’s known in the unknown, instead of surrendering to the unknown,” it feels like an instruction to the readers: to fully enjoy this story, give yourself over to the surreal.
Having surrendered, I found myself in a state of amusement and curiosity. I wanted to remain in the house with the narrator and visitor, to be privy to their strange interactions, to snicker at how they irritate each other, to find warmth in their strange bond—so much so that when the visitor does eventually leave, I, like the narrator, hoped it wasn’t for good.
Alas, as we and the narrator are reminded, what makes someone a visitor is “temporariness.”
No doubt, there is a comfort to be found in memories, and our lives bring many experiences worth holding on to. But stuck inside alone, we risk confusing that comfort with fulfillment, mistaking routine with progress. Overstaying suggests that when this happens, the fresh perspective of someone new may be just what is needed to help us open a door and face the unknown.
