4/5 stars
What's it about? The narrator lives in her childhood home alone and can’t quite rouse herself to leave the small town where she grew up. She becomes fascinated by a visitor and invites him to stay, and before long the visitor consumes her whole existence. Funny, trippy, and endlessly strange.
How’d I find it? I love this influencer for translated book recs. She knows what’s up.
Who will enjoy this book? Overstaying embraces absurdity and tension in the manner of Samanta Schweblin. In fact, the fluidity of interiors reminds me of Seven Empty Houses.
What stood out? The narrator’s sense of humor makes this bizarre tale more fun than creepy, quite a feat when the visitor with his furry “brushfingers” mutates and evolves the longer he lingers. Overstaying fills inertia with small horrors (how I loved the sentient vacuum cleaners) and completes its sense of claustrophobia with short, choppy chapters. Koch pulls off an immersive mirage of a book.
Which line made me feel something? This tidbit had me laughing out loud: “It’s all the same to me whether or not he’s planning to poison the neighbor children. They’re all right, because they’re small, but then again they’re not that small; now that I think about it, they have chubby thighs.”