The unabridged version of a haunting story of a man in prison.
His wife, brother, and mistress recognize him and call him by his name, Anatol Ludwig Stiller. But he rejects them, repeatedly insisting that he’s not Stiller. Could he possibly be right-or is he deliberately trying to shake off his old identity and assume a new one?
Held in a Zurich remand prison, the captive insists he is an American named Sam White who arrived from Mexico. Are his wild confessions the inventions of an innocent stranger, or the desperate smokescreen of an artist evading his past?
Official attempts to verify his identity produce only mockery, as he fills court-issued notebooks with tales of Jamaican murders and volcanic ash.
Even the arrival of Julika, the delicate ballerina who flew from Paris to reclaim her husband, cannot soften his refusal. Does his denial spring from genuine oblivion, or from a dread of the life waiting for him in Zurich?
Translated by Michael Bullock. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
- Unreliable Narrator: Through seven private notebooks written under lock and key, the narrator offers competing versions of his life, leaving authorities and readers unable to separate fantasy from truth.
- Swiss Literature: Exploring national conformity through the haunting memory of an unexecuted order at a Spanish Civil War river crossing.
- Multiple POV: Part One records Stiller’s feverish prison journals, while Part Two shifts to the measured postscript of the public prosecutor whose own wife was Stiller’s lover.
- European Literature: A devastating portrait of a fractured marriage, examining the emotional distance between an ailing ballerina at a Davos sanatorium and the husband who fled her side.
- Also by This Author: Homo Faber, Gantenbein and Bluebeard.
