Eighteen-year old Christian, high school student in a small seaside town along the Baltic Sea coast, is a silent participant in the memorial gathering for highly popular English teacher, Stella Peterson. While others praise her youthful and lively personality, express their respect or admiration for the colleague and teacher, Christian is absorbed fiction work. This short prose work, written in 2008, was his first to break a long silence following a devastating personal tragedy. In this novella, Lenz's language is straight forward and easy and also subtle when describing the very few private encounters between "the lovers". [Friederike Knabe]

Just barely. To tell the truth, if this maudlin melodrama had been written - translated as "Stella" in English -- is an eighteen-year-old male, a student who has had a sexual liaison with his teacher, a vivacious young woman possibly no more than eight or ten years older than he is. The narrator is sitting at a 'memorial service' for the teacher; thus we know from the start that she is dead, but we will need to read to the bitter end to learn how she died. The narration drifts from present-time observation of the memorial service to non-chronological memories of the affair.

Published in Germany in 2006, this novella reeks of sensational newspaper accounts of illicit sex between femal teachers and male students in the USA over the previous decade. Sex between male teachers and female students, as we all know, isn't newsworthy. If it sounds as if I'm accusing Lenz of sensationalism and exploitation, it's true. I am. This is a shallow portrayal, all from one side, of an unhealed trauma and a senseless death. To compare it, as some have, to the works of W.G. Sebald is absurd. Yes, it deals with "memory" as the essence of Life, as Sebald does, but it doesn't deal honestly or plausibly. A better comparison would be to the American romancer Danielle Steele.