Marcia de Vermont

A two-month stay in an artist colony in Vermont confronts Peter, the narrator of this story, with the ghosts of his past: suddenly everything seems to remind him of Marcia, the woman he met thirty years ago, when he was a young artist trying to make a name for himself in the Big Apple. The Christmas they spent together, he discovers now, could have changed his life forever, and the haunting solitude of the ghostly snowy landscape that surrounds him only invites him to revisit those days of discovery and abandonment, and to imagine the life he did not have. Peter Stamm captures with the mastery and precision that characterize him that painful gap between lived reality and the fantasy of what could have been that often accompanies maturity.