SEASONS

"Die Jahreszeiten" (1967), "Seasons", is Peter Bichsel's second book after "And Really Frau Blum Would Very Much Like to Meet the Milkman", and it is his only novel. The seasons of the title mark out a denied time—that of the life of Kieninger, the protagonist, phantom tenant, and alter ego of the narrator—and a real time, that in which the narrator's house changes before his attentive and ironic eyes, aging and deteriorating. The attempts to give Kieninger a story alternate in the novel with meticulous descriptions of the house and its tenants, providing, across the eight chapters, a structure to the deliberately deconstructed rhythm of the narrative. "Seasons" is an experimental novel (much loved by the author) that carries to its extreme consequences what would be, years later, the theoretical framework of his "Frankfurt Lectures": "Narrating is the fundamental characteristic of a story, and not its content."