Overstaying

A young woman ekes out a living in a house that is too big in a town that is too small right by a triangular mountain. When a guest turns up, she takes him in without hesitation. The guest is as promisingly new as he is strange and he quickly becomes the captivating centre of attention, but also the victim of inquisitorial fantasies of power. Until he finally escapes the clutches of the increasingly obsessive landlady and she herself, alone again, embarks on a long-awaited journey and now becomes a guest in her turn.

Overstaying is a novel of wonderfully wilful narration that asks questions about the known and the unknown, about origin and home, about assimilation and integration, about privacy and hospitality. A debut whose delight in fabulating and fantasising is captivating.

»The finiteness of our time together already hung above the bar, above the guest. It is a pity that we always miss the beginnings of things, while the ends pound themselves into the body.«
 

»Comparing this magnificent first novel to the great Kafka does it no disservice – on the contrary.« Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Overstaying is a joy to read. It’s tautly written, caustically witty, and replete with imaginative insights. I’m already excited to read Koch’s second book; she is so perceptive, convincing and poised a writer that it makes you feel grateful that such a talent shares your world.« Luke Kennard, The Telegraph

»Overstaying is a short novel of huge ambition. Much of its beauty lies in its arresting use of language, the unruly juxtaposition of images that ought not to cohere but somehow do, jolting us from our complacency towards a more vital understanding of the world.« Nina Allen, Times Literary Supplement

»Layered, experimental, and fragmented, this novel embraces the strangeness both in and around us.« Kirkus Reviews

»Told in swirling, disorienting fragments, the narration is sometimes funny ... sometimes lightly ominous, ... and consistently sharp.« Publishers Weekly

»So many novels have been written about immigration — what it means to leave home and install oneself in a foreign land, what it means to be left behind — that you might think there’s nothing more to say. ... But then you read Overstaying by Ariane Koch ... the novel takes these themes and transforms them into a strange, brilliant fever dream.« Financial Times

»Overstaying has the makings of a classic.« Nicole Seifert, Zeit Online

»... an intense, enigmatic – in the best sense of the word – debut of philosophical force ...« Miryam Schellbach, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»I have rarely read a novel that contains so many great sentences.« Maria-Christina Piwowarski, blauschwarzberlin

»A brave debut, remarkable in its literary aesthetics.« Christian Metz, Deutschlandfunk

»I recommend Ariane Koch‘s book Overstaying for anyone who might want to read literature that truly takes your mind off things in smaller doses.« Alexander Wasner, SWR2

»Ariane Koch's debut novel Overstaying is a convincing, highly complex linguistic image: a woman struggles with an uninvited, unknown, unexplained guest and with the projection surface of herself that this confrontation presents for her. In Koch's light, precise and yet dreamlike language, scenes emerge that – as in the theatre of the absurd – seem at first to make no sense at all and then a tremendous amount of sense. Derrida, writing about hospitality, stated that absolute hospitality means opening one's home: to ›give place‹ not only to the stranger, but also to the unknown, to the other without expecting reciprocity. Koch skilfully varies this postmodern utopia of opening oneself to the unknown in her impressive literary debut.« Jury statement on the ZDF-»aspekte« Prize for Literature 2021

»The poetic-documentary search that Ariane Koch embarks on perhaps comes closer to what it could stand for from today’s perspective than a factually documented biography. To narrate, to perform, to empathise and to critically scrutinise, so masterfully that, despite all the heaviness, it is also possible to laugh.« Excerpt from the Swiss Theatre Festival’s praise of Ariane Koch’s play Verdeckt