A man detained at the Swiss border insists that he is not Anatol Ludwig Stiller, the missing sculptor everyone else believes him to be.

Calling himself James Larkin White, he is imprisoned while the authorities, friends and estranged wife reconstruct Stiller’s life around him. The following story explores how, terrifyingly, identity can ever be settled by biography, testimony or social recognition.

First published in German as Stiller in 1954, the novel turns the problem of the double inward. It is a power-play and the terrible friction ensuing from the person we experience ourselves as being forced against the person preserved in other people’s memories. Stiller’s attempted reinvention becomes both existential revolt and ethical problem: if other people have been injured by the person you once were, can simply declaring yourself someone else release you from responsibility? Dry, fractal and psychologically exact, it sits somewhere between existential fiction, courtroom novel and philosophical experiment. 

Harcourt Brace & Company / Harvest Book, San Diego, New York and London, 1994. First Harvest edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor creasing and softening to corners. Pages clean and lightly toned; binding sound. Very good used condition.