In a Deep Blue Hour

by Peter Stamm

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A documentary filmmaker uncovers the secrets of an enigmatic author in this subtly enthralling novel from “one of Europe’s most exciting writers” (New York Times Book Review).

For days, documentary filmmaker Andrea and her team have been waiting for Richard Wechsler in his Swiss hometown. During their first shoots in Paris, the famous writer had not wanted to reveal much about himself, and now the whole film threatens to fail.

In the narrow streets and alleys of the village, Andrea searches for traces of Wechsler’s life, contrary to their agreement. But it is not until she starts reading his books again that she discovers a clue to a childhood sweetheart who might still be living there. An old love who influenced his whole life, but whom no one ever knew about.

Release date: March 18, 2025

Publisher: Other Press

Print pages: 224

Sample

I don't know how much time I have left, says Wechsler, but then who does? Sometimes I’ve felt closer to the end than I do just now.
He is standing on the banks of the Seine, the sky is overcast, a couple of pigeons fly past. Wechsler gesticulates, as though to dispel the thought. In the background there’s a bateau-mouche going past at surprising speed. Wechsler turns away from the camera, looks down at the river, shrugs.
What about starting with that?
That was after he told us about his accident in the mountains, isn’t that right? says Tom. He is sitting on the bed, reading.
What’s that you’re reading? And it wasn’t an accident, just a near thing.
For Wechsler it was un moment critique.
Are you proposing that we take him up into the mountains and film him stumbling around remembering? If he shows at all. We’ve heard the story anyway. Thomas.
Lately, he’s wanted me to call him Thomas. Why would someone who for forty years has gone by Tom suddenly want to be Thomas? I rewind.
It would be nice if we could get some footage in the mountains, says Tom. Mountains always look good. Paris, the village, the mountains.
Presumably, the story gets more dramatic each time he tells it. What’s that you’re reading?
The hotel brochure. A brief voyage of discovery round the hotel, surrounded by varied scenery in idyllic wine-growing country. A sought-after gastronomic area, offering delights for every taste. An ideal venue for the combining of work and pleasure, free Internet connection, an El Dorado for the businessman.
What about the businesswoman? There it is. I switch to play.
. . . got lost, says Wechsler, but instead of going back . . . you know I’ve always hated retracing my steps. I was going up an incline, steeper and steeper, and the footing was loose, I had the feeling nothing was moored anymore. And then I got to these boulders. I thought . . . I really had a sense of my own mortality . . . It suddenly struck me . . .
He has the annoying quality of not finishing his sentences. You know what he means, but he never says it. We can’t make a film of all broken-off sentences.
I push fast-forward.
. . . but then who does, says Wechsler. Sometimes I’ve felt closer to the end than I do just now.
We could stick it at the end, says Tom. As a perspective. The film’s over, life goes on. And he walks into the sunset, at that little lake. There’s one of his books that ends like that.
No, that was the sea, I say. I’d like to have my own room.
I’m going for a walk, says Tom. Thomas.
Thomas? I can’t keep a straight face when I call him that.
Andrea? he says, and looks at me expectantly. He climbs down off the bed with a groan and puts on his shoes.
Why don’t your shoes have laces? And why haven’t I noticed that before?
They’re Japanese.
And the Japanese can’t tie shoelaces? Bah! I ought to go out myself. I’m going stir-crazy in here.

Tom was gone all afternoon. I would have liked to go for a walk myself, but we’re not here for fun, we only have so many days we can film on. Paris was a strain on the budget as it was, with the hotel and meals. Even if there’s not much we can do just at the moment, I think it’s important to be here, keep some sort of presence. That’s a typical Wechsler word: presence. He was supposed to arrive today, and I went to the station to collect him but he wasn’t on the train he said he would be on. Perhaps he got the day wrong.
Call him, Tom said.
He doesn’t have a mobile.
Of course he has a mobile, I’ve seen him with it.
Well, then he hasn’t shared the number. I’ll send him an email.
I sent him one already. That was this morning, and he hasn’t replied. I’ve eaten nothing all day.
I take a sheet of paper, and write: Childhood, Mountains, Water, Paris, Women. And then one more: Books. Who is the woman? I write. I crumple up the paper and throw it in the bin.
I play around with our footage, piece together a short video. Wechsler walking. He crosses Montparnasse Cemetery, he walks along a broad boulevard, he walks in the Luxembourg Gardens. He walks down a different boulevard, he strolls along the banks of the Seine, looking at the secondhand book stalls, he takes a book out of one of the boxes, a book of photographs, flicks through it, takes it and pays. He walks down a narrow lane, the camera is close behind him. He approaches the camera, he does something with his hand in front of his face, it looks nice. Even though he has this unworldly demeanor, he has a pretty good idea of what looks good on film. He walks past the camera. I could make a two-hour film of Wechsler walking in Paris. He enters a bakery, comes out again, says something, and laughs. That was when he bought croissants for all of us. He can be charming sometimes.
Something has got my attention, but I couldn’t say what it is. Something somehow out of the ordinary. I play through the video again. Now I notice the same woman in the background of two of the sequences, first in the cemetery, then on the boulevard. She’s too far away, and I can’t really see her features, but she’s wearing a light-green raincoat, which is fairly unusual. Also her movements seem the same, there’s something skippy about her walk, I’m sure it’s the same woman. Maybe it’s coincidence, but they were shot at different times. Curious. Another Wechsler word, that: curious.
Now I wonder what’s keeping Tom?

Something happened that day, I don’t know what, but it wasn’t anything good. It was the last day of the shoot in Paris, we had met up as always in the café on the Rue du Bac, the Café Les Mouettes. I don’t know of anywhere in the world that you would associate less with seagulls. Maybe there’s somewhere in the Gobi Desert, or the South Pole. To begin with, we’d assumed it was Wechsler’s local, then it turned out that he had picked it at random and had never been there. I think he wanted to meet us in a neutral place. Or maybe lay a false trail. It could easily be my local, he said, if I had anything like that.
At our first meeting in the Café Les Mouettes, he pointed out a little gate that led to a courtyard and then to the Chapelle de l’Epiphanie of the Missions Etrangères. From here thousands of missionaries were dispatched all over the world, to make converts . . . He spotted the Nespresso store next door, and laughed. These are the missionaries of today. Coffee for all, the new epiphany of taste.
Toward the end of the filming that day, I noticed that Wechsler was in a bad mood, and something was annoying him. Early afternoon, postlunch slump, typical. There was a bit of trouble with the microphone, Wechsler was impatient, though he sought to disguise it. He always tries to keep everything under wraps. It was Tom who was conducting the interview this time.
The unnamed narrator in your books, that’s always you, isn’t it?
I’d gone on and on to him about never asking that question, so presumably it was the first thing that leapt into his mind, maybe the only thing he could remember.
It’s not, Wechsler replies, it’s you, Tom, didn’t you notice?
Tom’s expression made me laugh. Luckily you can’t hear it on the soundtrack. Wechsler grinned.
Let’s talk about women, then, says Tom from out of shot. They are very important in your writing, but you’ve never been married.
Wechsler’s expression goes rigid, he stares straight into the camera. For a moment I wonder if he’s even heard the question, or was off in his thoughts somewhere. Then, very slowly and in a pained voice, as though explaining something to a clueless child, What else am I going to write about? Keeping rabbits? Tom laughs awkwardly. The evening before, he had laid out his theory about Wechsler and women, a complicated structure of desire and seduction, with narcissism and Wechsler’s mother also involved, or maybe it was his father, I’m no longer sure. He had another theory, too, about confrontational communication, which he was evidently just putting to the test. For now he seems to have come up short anyway, because a long silence ensues.
Is it more important to you to love or to be loved? he finally asks. I mean, honestly, what a question.
What a question! says Wechsler. Is this a film about books or bed? I write about men and women because men and women populate our world. He gets up, and I take off after him with the camera. He stalks out of the café.
The camera stays fixed on the door for a moment, then pans to the side, you see Wechsler outside the café, lighting a cigarette, people go by, a flash of green, it’s not the woman in the raincoat again, is it? Traffic, a bus, a bicycle messenger in a hi-vis jacket. You hear the noise of cars on the soundtrack, and Wechsler’s voice, softly, he’s still miked up. I play through the footage a couple of times before I can make out what he’s saying: This isn’t going anywhere. Afterward, he apologized for his behavior.
That was the day I first wondered why Wechsler was even participating in our project, as he wanted not to give anything of himself away. Even in one of our preliminary conversations he quoted Pessoa: If after my life you want to write my biography, nothing simpler. It consists of two dates—birth and death. All the days between are mine. What did he think we were going to make a film about?
At six, Tom reappears. He walks in without knocking, but I don’t feel like training him anymore; all that’s over.
I found the butcher, he says.
Now it’s my turn to go out for a bit. I’d like some fresh air too.
In the doorway, I turn to look at him. Well, and is it more important to love or to be loved?
He gives me his most gormless expression.

I don't understand this place. I continually lose my way in it, even though the center isn’t even very big. I keep losing my way, and don’t know where I am. I could have sworn there was a supermarket across the street in front of the hotel, but there’s a large, mostly empty parking lot.
It’s all honeycombed with passages, lanes, alleyways, in which you can lose your way. I made note of a couple of places that Wechsler mentioned in conversation: the school, the church, the bar he met his friends at, also the address of his parents on the other side of the railway tracks. I wonder what it would feel like to know all these places, these streets and buildings, the people there, a network of stories and memories. For me, it’s just a place like any other, neither big nor small, neither strikingly beautiful nor particularly ugly.
As I get to the station, a freight train is just passing through. I compulsively count the cars, the way I always did when I was a girl. Thirteen. Didn’t they use to be longer? Or does it just seem like that to me, because I’m bigger, so they seem shorter? Because I’m better at counting?
I walk through the underpass and come to a precinct with single-family homes. It’s remarkably cold for the time of year, and I wish I’d brought a sweater.
There’s nothing arresting here. The houses all seem to come from the forties and fifties, a few are new. The gardens are well tended. There are children playing on the street. I wonder what it was like here forty or fifty years ago? Presumably not much different. Only the carports and garages, which clearly every house needs, seem new. This is where Wechsler will have played on the street, back in the day, and ridden around on his bicycle, and perched on the garden fence and chatted with the kids next door. I wonder if everything was already present in him then? The dim foreknowledge of pain? What will these children one day become? Carpenters, teachers, accountants, writers? Suddenly, they’re all grown-up, and nothing is the way it used to be.
You need a village, Wechsler said in the course of one of our conversations, not to be alone anymore. The people and the plants and the soil all harbor a bit of you, and even if you don’t know it, it’s there waiting for you. A couple of sentences he managed to finish, and not before time. But then he wasn’t their author. So who was it? And is it even true? Is there anything left of Wechsler hereabouts? Isn’t it that a bit of here will have survived in him?
Eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, the next one must be the house he grew up in. A middle-aged woman is standing by the garden gate, seeming like she might be waiting for someone. His sister, maybe, or his sister-in-law? Does he even have siblings? No idea. Does it matter?
I wonder about speaking to the woman, but before I reach her, she’s turned around and gone back into the house, as though she wanted to hide from me. The name on the mailbox doesn’t mean anything to me.