Overstaying

“I don’t see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, & readers can take different paths through the rooms,” writes Ariane Koch of Overstaying, her anarchically comic debut. 

Koch’s narrator is an impudent young woman, a contemporary Bartleby living alone in her parents’ old house in the small hometown she hates but can’t bring herself to leave. When a visitor turns up, promisingly new, she takes him in, & instantly her life revolves around him. Yet it is hard to tell what, exactly, this visitor is. A mooch, a lover, an absence, a presence—possibly a pet? Mostly, he is a set of contradictions, an occasion for Koch’s wild imagination to take readers in brilliant & unexpected directions.

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An isolated woman clashes with an enigmatic visitor in this funny, jagged parable about integration, difference & hospitality

An isolated young woman living in a small Swiss town decides to take in a mysterious stranger, known only as ‘the visitor’. His arrival introduces disturbance into her carefully sealed life, & the longer he stays, the more confounding he becomes. His joy causes her sadness, his sleep brings her insomnia, & she becomes convinced he is sneaking into her room, even eating her socks. As she tries to impose orders & regulations on her opaque visitor, the woman’s fantasies of power & control grow ever wilder.

Sly, wilful & full of slanted humour, Overstaying is a profound & uncanny exploration of hospitality, integration & the stranger within all of us.

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Ariane Koch was born in Basel & studied fine arts & interdisciplinarity. She writes—often in collaboration—theater & performance texts, radio plays, & prose. Her texts have won numerous awards.