Category: Switzerland

Sweet Days Of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

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Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

Swiss fiction

Original title – I beati anni del castig0

Translator – Tim Parks

Source – Personal Copy

Have you ever thought you had read a book by a writer, but after you have read it by them, discover you hadn’t thought you had at some point?  Well, that has just happened. After reading so many books over the years, it was bound to happen, and And Other Stories is a publisher. I have read a lot of books over the years. Hence, I naturally thought I had read this writer. Several of her books from And Other Stories have come out in the UK in the last few years. I have brought a couple over that time, so I thought I had read one. But no, this is her first book I have read. Jaeggy lived in Rome, where she became friends with Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, and met her later husband, the editor and writer Roberto Calasso . She speaks French, German and Italian

Frédérique was beginning to look at me. I felt the weight of her eyes on my body. It was like a punch in the beck sometimes, and I would turn. Sometimes, at table, I sensed her gaze on me, and then I held myself straighter and ate with the most refined manners, so that I hardly ate at all. But at breakfast, even if she was watching me, I helped myself to two or three slices of bread and butter and marmalade. And I have to admit that I thought of nothing but breakfast. When I dunked my bread in my coffee that time it was out of sheer greed, without thinking. I seem to remember Frédérique smiled, out of indulgence I suppose. Now she was asking me to spend time with her, and she kept her eye on me from a disctance

Her instona connection with the new gir;

The book opens with the narrator, a 14-year-old currently at a boarding school, talking about the fact that nearby is where Robert Walser used to walk and eventually die in the snow. This is one of those books that did not. A lot of plot, more framing of this girl, and the fact that a new Girl  Frédérique, whom our narrator becomes obsessed with from trying to be like her in many ways, writes like her. The story evolves around a schoolmistress and some other girls in her year. But what happens when suddenly she has to depart, as something has happened to her father? Then out of the blue, another New pupil, Micheline. This fills the void, but when summer arrives, her mother tries to send her to what sounds like a finishing school. Our narrator rebels, which means she has two more encounters with Frédérique. The book ends with a strange echoing of the opening and a madness in her friend that sometimes mirrors Walsers’ madness.

She attached a value to her poverty, the way others might to their extravagance. She was truly possessed by her indigent state, all she had was herself, but it was more than enough, since the aromas of servitude bubbled up from her constantly, a natural predisposition. How small and slippery her feet were when she went quick as quick up and down the corridor, and how well she knew how to disappear when the reverend mother called her, barely whispering her name. Reverend mothers always speak very softly. And how she would genuflect sideways in the chapel! Her big eyes were well suited to contemplating the crucifix. If she hadn’t been an informer, we would have believed, generously, in her magnanimous devotion and obedience.

I picked this it shows how great her writng is !

This is a book that is wonderfully well written and is so captivating. I connected with the narrator as I had friends I wanted to be like when I was younger. I struggled with who I am most of my teen years, never quite getting my own identity. It wasn’t till later in life that I became comfortable with myself. I also connected with the part where our narrator would be sent to what sounded like a finishing school. My late stepmother went to finishing school growing up, and I remember her talking about that time, which would maybe be a similar time to the book being set, which is the sixties, I think it is never mentioned. Anyway, it is a book that is not a lot that happens it is a few months in her life,  a sort of view of being young and impressionable. Some social attitudes towards some of the characters show an underlying issue, the daughter of an African leader, and how she is viewed. But it captures a girl in Frederique that is brilliant, but as it turns out, also flawed and unstable, it isn’t too late that she sees this. I loved this book. Have you read any books by her?

 

The sweet indifference of the world by Peter Stamm

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The sweet Indiffernece of the world by Peter Stamm

Swiss fiction

Original title – Die sanfte Gleichgültigkeit der Welt,

Translator – Michael Hofmann

Source – Library book

I put this down as a library book, but I think I might have been sent it a couple of years ago by the US publisher. I had read it then but hadn’t reviewed it, and as I read it the other day, it came to mind, I’m sure this book reminds me of something. I went to log it on my reading apps and saw I had read it two years ago. I am a massive fan of Stamm’s work his book always seem to be ones you remember after you have read them the ideas in the linger like this had, He has won most of the major prizes in the German speaking world and maybe shoiuld be a little better known to English readers for me he is in those list of writers that is in line for a Nobel or on the list of writers that could for me anyway..

She visits me often, usually at night. She stands by my bed, looking down at me, and says, You’ve aged. She doesn’t say it in a nasty way, though, her voice sounds affectionate, almost merry. She sits down on the side of the bed. But then your hair, she says, tousling it with her hand, it’s as thick as it ever was. Only it’s gone white.

You’re not getting any older though, I say to her. I’m not sure if that’s a happy thought for me or not. We never talk much, after all, what is there to say. The time goes by. We look at each other and smile.

The opening lines of the book

This book has a twist, but we are never fully told if it is the twist we think it is, just a hint, if that makes sense. Christopher, a writer in later middle age, recalls a story to a young actress named Lena. The story is remembered as the woman he is telling about has the same name as her, except he calls the woman in his story Magdalena, the full version of her name, as the relationship from his post, which was also an actress. To make it even odder, Lena is in a relationship with a writer called Chris. As the story unfolds from Christopher, the lines between his past and her present blur, and what is happening is never quite told, but hinted at. Is this what is happening, or is it just a weird connection between them all having the same jobs and names? Never quite told why this has happened, but it is just one of those stories that seem to twist and turn in on themselves as you read along.

My novel, though, was a hit with booksellers and readers; even the reviewers seemed to sit up. This debut promised all sorts of things for the future, wrote one woman. And in fact I did believe in some sort of future, for the first time in a while. After living from hand to mouth for several years, the success of my book secured not a lavish but a respectable income; but above all I had something to show for myself that justified all my en-deavors. The years of failed writing already felt like a long-distant time, in which I was caught up in labyrinthine plots, and driven by exaggerated ambitions.

I never admitted how much my story was about me.

When I was asked about that after readings, I dismissed the idea, and insisted on the separation between author and narrator.

Christopher is a succesful writer in his time !

I wish I had reviewed this a couple of years ago. Still, strangely, in the two years since I read it, I have thought of it a few times every time I heard the name Magdalena, I had come back to this book and the strange tale of a man from the future telling his fiance a story in the past or is it just a weird sort of Mobius loop of Two couples with the same names and jobs meeting at a point in one relation ship has started and the other has ended and is so distant it is a memory being told in the present/ I loved this it is a tale that has again left me thinking about it all and how in life there are just moments that seem as thou they have been planned or relived or even just beyond what is typically we all have those small deja vu memories. Even people we assume that we know but don’t, dopplegangers, etc. Very Stamm book, he does so well on the psychological level as a writer! He keeps you, as the reader thinking of his stories long after you have read them. Have you read any of his book ?

Eurotrash by Christain Kracht

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Eurotrash by Christain Kracht

Swiss fiction

The original title is Eurotrash

Translator – Daniel Bowles

Source – personal copy

I’m a bit slow off the block with my Booker international reviews. But life sometimes just catches up with me. I have read a number of the books in fact tonight I hope finish the fourst of the list anyway this was the first I read, I had seen this pop up a couple of times before the longlist and I had vaguely heard the writers name, maybe because it was shortlisted when it came out for both the German and Swiss book prize both of which I look at most years, hoping at some point to maybe read one fo those shortlists in there original language. Christian Kracht is both a novelist and journalist; he is known to consistently perform as a writer. He has said some things to maybe provoke a reaction. This book is a follow-up to his debut novel, but 35 years later, as a writer, he takes his elderly mother on a road trip.

I had once inquired: the University of Montana held no records of his ever having studied there, let alone grad-uated. Neither the alumni association nor the university archives found a Christian Kracht. There were also photos that showed him at his fake job at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Then he’d returned to Germany, into the benevolent clutches of Eduard Rhein and British Major George Clare, whose parents had been murdered in Auschwitz and who worked in the denazification bureau in Hamburg as liaison officer to the newly emergent, democratic German press and who committed Axel Springer to eternal friendship with Israel, an effort that so repulsed many SS alumni that they went off to Rudolf Augstein’s Der Spiegel magazine instead.

My father and Augstein often sat together in their favorite restaurant, Mühlenkamper Fährhaus. Each only ever ordered the Schlemmerschnitte-caviar and steak tartare on thickly buttered black bread-which, Augstein claimed, Hans Albers had always eaten there before the war. To accompany it Augstein drank ice-cold glasses of Linie aquavit, my father mineral water.

The past and of course the wealth does show through at times

SO what wee have Kracht discusses his family history and how his family made a lot of money of the Nazis and this book is how him and his mother in her 80s deal with that she has just be released from a mental institution. As the two follow a road south through Switzerland through the places he grew up, his mother also knows they had planned to give away some of the fortune made from the family to clear their shoulds. The book isn’t overly plot heavy and more a group of meeting along the way that see them trying to get rid of the money and condf=fronting other horrors from there past now the mother running of prescription drugs and Booze. Her son is full of the ghosts of his own past, overbearing family members, sexual abuse and the dark history of the making of the family fortune. This makes for a black comedy of a book about two people trying to reconnect and put things right, but along the way making some falls.

Often, when old people who have lost touch would like to suggest elegance, they resort to Bulgari. In my youth, there had been a Bulgari glass case with Bulgari jewelry in the dreadful discotheque Club Rotes Kliff on Sylt, in Kampen.

And in the dreadful luxury hotels in Marbella and Venice and Positano there were always Bulgari grooming products lying around in the bathrooms. Dreadful places like Qatar and Dubai were serviced by dreadful luxury airlines who likewise offered Bulgari products in their in-flight shower stalls.

Over the years my mother had internalized the idea that Bul-gari must embody something elegant, something desirable, while in reality these products and this name only triggered depression and thoughts of suicide. In which wardrobe were her cashmere sweaters, please, I called down the stairs.

His mother is a unique character in this book

I am aware this writer has been compared to Brett Easton Ellis, and I can see that it is a couple of decades ago that I read Less Than Zero by Ellis. I also see a come thread in German literature the Past ghost of family being Nazis haunting the present. It is also a road trip , a family drama with a large chunk of black humour. This book would make a great movie The mother would suit a German Maggie Smith if there is such a thing one of those great character actors that can capture a sort of upper class aserbicness like a Nazi Violet Crawley mixed with the queen mother in a jaunt thri=ough her and her sons past. The Father was working for the German Rupert Murdoch, and the book is a mix of a journey and a memoir of his life. It’s a book about money facing your own family’s past and how to cope with that in the present. Have any of you read his debut novel, Fraserland, which I think hadn’t yet been translated to English, which is a shame, well, according to the Wiki page.

Overstaying by Ariane Koch

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Overstaying by Aeriane Koch

Swiss fiction

Original title – Die Aufdrängung

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Personal copy

I said yesterday I was tempted by the translated titles from the US Republic of Consciousness prize longlist. This was already on my radar after hearing it on the One Bright Book podcast it is the debut novel from the writer and had won several book prizes when it came out. I think this is one of those books that is hard to say what it is as it isn’t sci fi sci-fi horror it is lots of bits put together. It’s one of those books that seems to have come from nowhere. The writer is a performance artist on the side; you can see it in the book. I will try and do what they did on One Bright Book and try to add context to this mad book.

My reputation seems to have improved since the visitor has been occupying my house and my time. For example, there are neighbor children who never used to even glance at me, who now constantly kick soccer balls into my yard, supposedly by accident, so that they can knock on my front door and gawk at the visitor.

Every time this happens the visitor jumps up to offer them candy, and I don’t prevent him. It’s all the same to me whether or not he’s planning to poison the neighbor children. They’re all right, because they’re small, but then again they’re not that small; now that I think about it, they have chubby thighs.

The neighbor children suck on their exotic candies, still gawking, but they don’t move from the front door.

I contemplate availing myself of the broom, or the herd of spooky vacuum cleaner nozzles. The visitor beats me to it, though, by laughing and trying to hold the children’s hands, at which they run back outside, shrieking.

The vacumm cleaners that had risen up it seems alla bit weird!

 

The book is set in what seems to be a sort of near future where there aren’t many people, and there are visitors. We glimpse the visitor who, hat, lives with our Narrator. Then we have odd little pieces like the Hooovers, who seem to have come to life and tried to take over. We have the narrator, the daughter and granddaughter of a family that has lived in this village for many years. She seems to have a past hinted at throughout the book. The Visitor is never described. We have things mentioned like him having a sort of relationship with the hoovers and brush fingers. There is a sense our narrators are drawing close to each other. The book is odd erie at times and overs like a typical everyday story. It is one of those that you need to read. It is surreal in a different way. The book seems to drift as well at times, it seems like time has stopped, if that makes sense, this could have been days, weeks or even years in the book

The visitor refuses to accept that the earth turns, that the sun alternatingly rises and sets. He takes every day like the first ever, gets out of his bed, puts on a blinded face, and waddles across the balcony, squinting at the surrounding panoramic vista – he knows no name for anything, has no memory at all of yesterday when I identified each individual mountain peak for him by means of a short lecture.

His morning rituals are a mystery to me. He twirls his hair with his fingers, slurps milky liquids from giant bowls, wears fake fur draped around his shoulders. The visitor is one big tackiness, an insult to the aesthetic eye. I feel sympathy for him, for he imitates a hippie or a woolly mammoth or some other extinct species, which doesn’t much help him understand the present. He stays lost in his own thoughts while work is being done, while money is being shoveled into accounts, while the day is being given a certain rhythm.

He, on the other hand, moves through time in circles.

At times is he a post war cave man I wondered as well !

I said I try to capture this book well. If a Swiss post-apocalyptic soap opera was set in a small village directed by David Lynch, it would be this. But then I recently rewatched the early Whose Line is it anyway? The recent death of Tony Slattery made me think this could be a sketch of the setting of a soap opera, the characters from an alien encounter film in the style of slow-burning romance as the world falls apart.  I feel this is one of those books that you just can’t say it’s like this book or that book I’ve read as it is just a little surreal in that what she has done is captured that ordinary story but with a few surreal pieces. Another image I had was Dysons marching around like the hammers did in the film The Wall, but that is just me. Have you read this book or have a favourite work that is a little surreal?

A simple intervention by Yael Inokai

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A  simple intervention by Yael Inokai

Swiss fiction

Original title – Ein simpler Eingriff

Translator – Marielle Sutherland

Source – subscription book

I am back to the latest book from Peirene and a book from a coming Swiss writer, Yael Inokai; this is her third novel and ias the first to be published in English (don’t get me started on publishing books in the order they came out ) so we have a couple more books at some point. She has won several prizes, such as the Swiss Literature Prize and the Anne Seghers Prize (this book won the prize). This book is one of those books that have themes about females getting operated on by men. What medicine can do, love, and what happens when the world you are in is far different than it seems at the start of the book. It has been compared to Attwood and Ishiguro for making a dystopic tale.

The brain is a map. Everything I am is located there. I grew into my profession with this image in my head. It made sense. Tumours crush optic nerves, leading to blindness.

Neurological diseases erode people’s memories, their lan-guage, their motor skills, little by little, until their hands can’t even keep a grip any more. These diseases can be located. Why should it be any different with psychological disorders? Why shouldn’t we be able to remove these too, and release people into a life worth living?

It took no time at all to complete the intervention. We were usually in theatre no longer than an hour. It was simple, and like everything simple, it had taken a long time to develop and refine. The right tools, the right hands that knew how to use the tools, the right voices to guide the procedure. And the failures, of course. No one liked to talk about those. But failures drove development.

The op helps people cope it says !

The book is set in an unnamed town in Switzerland. We meet a nurse who works at a state-of-the-art hospital and performs special operations to free people of their psychological problems. We see this all through the eyes of Meret; she loves her job and is a rising star in the hospital, so much so that she has been given the job of aiding those in the operating theatre to make sure the patients go through the op ok. But the two grow close when a new nurse, Sarah, is in the dorm. The only problem is Sarah questions the op that in some ways looks pretty similar to the old-fashioned lobotomy, and it is strange it is mainly female patients in for this treatment and the outcomes it can have. So when an operation on a patient called Mariella goes horribly wrong, she starts to question her job, and the world around her changes. It is how this procedure has dealt a blow to one woman and made the other wary, and the one between them is now questioning her own part in all this. There is some hope with a wonder drug that may help, but it answers: is this the way to treat mental health?

I waited for her. Sometimes I lay in bed in our room and waited for her.

I’d always tried to bundle together my days off to give me enough time to travel home. This didn’t always work out. Sometimes I had the odd day left over – not enough to make the trip.

Once I began sharing a room with Sarah, I stayed in bed longer than usual on these days. I wanted to see her, exchange a glance, a few words. I wanted to know she really existed, the woman who lived in this room without being here. The more time that passed after our first encounter, the more I seemed justified in doubting it had happened at all.

When Sarah moves in she is drawn to her

I love the fact it tackles the question of how we treat mental health. It is much easier to talk about one’s mental health issues. I think most people struggle with their mental health, and it shows those who need meds and maybe life hasn’t been kind. But will this one procedure work, and why is it just a woman seemingly having the op. I was reminded of the doctors that in the fifties and still some places would do a lobotomy in seconds, not gathering the long-term horrors it would incur. It has a love story at its heart but also how women are treated by medicine. I think we’d all love a simple op that could sort out our mental health issues, but there is no such cure. One must question why the op is so popular, who is getting the treatment, the moral questions around that, and how love can change people’s view of their world. It has a feel of what could become something to make a dystopic world without ever feeling too unreal in how it is portrayed. Do you have any books that deal with Female mental health issues? Ill add the cover soon it wasn’t let me up load it at the moment

 

 

My Favourite by Sarah Jollien- Fardel

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My favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel

Swiss fiction

Original title – Sa préférée

Translator – Holly James

Source – Review copy

I was so pleased to get an email from an old PR connection about this book as Indigo Press has just brought some real gems out in the recent past, so this book was longlisted for the French Goncourt prize and won the Swiss version of the prize. I was also interested after reading it. One of the other prizes it won was a prize for books read by prisoners! Sarah Jollien -was born in a village like the main character in this book and fled to live in Lausanne; she is also a volunteer at a battered women’s society. She has also been a journalist for 30 years. This is her debut novel and multiple prize winner. The book is set in the 1970s in a small Swiss village in the mountains.

My dear friend. As we were leaving Mass, I’d heard those words, spoken by Dr Fauchère, whom we deferentially referred to as The Doctor’. The Doctor was one of the few people in our village back then who had a degree. That morning, Gaudin the butcher had given the Doctor a little bow on the church esplanade. Dr Fauchère interrupted his conversation to say: ‘Morning, my dear friend.’ How elegant those words sounded coming from his mouth. That warm smile, just the right amount of politeness and restraint. I saw how that ‘my dear friend’ gave the speaker an air of importance and made it clear to their interlocutor that they were not of the same rank. In a gentle, subtle way. So I decided to be bold and say it myself: ‘My dear friend.’ My father was not an educated man, but he had that instinct bad people and animals have.

She saw the Doctor as a man she could trust how wrong she was.

My only memory of the ’70s and Switzerland is Hedi, which we had on Tin the UK. This is the polar opposite of that romantic view of a mountain village. This is about the fear of silence when people can see what is happening but do nothing. Jeanne has grown up seeing both her sister and mother suffer at the hands of her father. So when he finally turns on her when she is 8 she decides she will go to the one man she seems to trust, and that is the village doctor, hoping with the power he has in the village of the one man with an education that people listen to she opens her heart about the violent attack of her father. Still, when he does nothing, her world looks set until she escapes to a boarding school and then later in life, after a brief return to the village, she finally gets to Lausanne a big city and feels invisible there as she recounts those years of her fathers abuse the effect the loss of a sister that was the fathers favourite that he did an unspeakable act. Her mother is caught in a catch-22 situation around her husband, and his violence is no escape. This is what you do about the monster at home.

Was my sister trying to frighten the life out of us all with her sudden death, or was it just to frighten him? Did she think she could give us a wake-up call to change things?

Or was it that everything – being rejected, the abortion, the child that was never born – had plunged her into such a black despair that death was the only thing that could put an end to the pain? I can’t accept that dying is the only way to stop suffering. It’s too absolute. It means we’ve lost against our father. I can’t accept that I was incapable of saving her.

The loss of her sister another victim of her father.

This is a brutal book about a violent man, a father and a husband from hell. This is about the silence we can see attached to domestic violence in a small village. Everyone seems to know what he did, but like the doctor, there is a wall of silence, which makes it even worse. This is a survivor’s tale. I was reminded of the violent father in This is England when reading this book. If you do not watch the series This is England, it captures domestic violence and asexual assault brutally. This is a powerful novella, and like the other book I have read from Indigo Press, it has a powerful voice behind the writing. It is a book about the darkest moments and how to escape, but do you ever escape that violence? Jeanne is in Lausanne, but there is still a feeling of what happened in the past. Have you read a book about domestic abuse?

Winston’s score – A – This is near the top of the year’s books so far.

The Blue Soda Siphon by Urs Widmer

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The Blue Soda Siphon

Swiss fiction

Original title – Der blaue Siphon

Translator – Donal McLaughlin

Source – Personal copy

I am a little late to starting this year’s German lit month in fact, I m not as organised as in other years, but I feel I will just post a couple of books this year as I’ve other books to read so this has been on my shelves for a couple of years. I am a massive fan of the publisher Seagull Books. They seem to plough their own furrow and have these lists of books from certain countries or places; this is from their Swiss list. Widmer grew up with literature. A frequent visitor to his house growing up was Heinrich Böll. He was an editor and then a freelance writer. He was known for his exciting plot twists, often surreal parodies using classic book ideas and spinning them into something new. He may feel like one of those writers who should been better known in English. He has several books on Seagulls list I have another apart from this, which is a short novella that twists on the time travel genre.

In the evening that day, a Friday, I went to the cinema, a city-centre cinema showing a film of which I knew only the name and that it had been praised in the morning paper or evening news. I’d confused it with something else, presumably, as the film was peculiar – more than just odd – not my taste. I was also completely alone in the cinema.Maybe it was a Monday. As ever I sat at the front, in the very first row, as I like to drown in films.Those widescreen films are already a thing of the past now, those CinemaScope worlds I could plunge into so deeply, I could never see everything, only parts, like in real life. For example, only when I saw Doctor Zhivago on TV much later -a moveable postage stamp, in comparison – did I realize that I’d seen but part of the action, on the right of the screen or the left.

The first visit to the cinema after which he goes back fifty years.

The book is clever as it has two chapters and two time travellers. I feel it is the same person, but it is not fully clear.. The first a man in his fifties goes to the cinema to watch a film and then when he leaves the cinema. He finds himself going back fifty years to his old house with his parents and to his own past it is looking at events that happened then as an adult that happened when he was a child. It is the day he has disappeared as a three-year-old for a single day. This mirrors the events in the book’s second half, as he can not remember them. He sees how his parents react. Now, in the second part of the book, a three-year-old goes to the cinema, and he leaves and is flung into the presence of the Narrator in the first book and is guided by a force to the house he now lives in. There is also a dog that seems to follow him into the future.

The dog shot out of the kitchen, raced yelping towards me and, licking me enthusias-tically, jumped at me. Hardly able to fend him off, I laughed and tried to save my face from his tongue. My mother appeared with a kitchen knife in her hand. She was wearing a bright summer dress and had a dish towel tucked into a narrow leather belt. She looked at us, the amorous dog and me, fighting back and giggling, and shouted,

“Jimmy! heel!’ And to me,’Couldn’t you have rung the doorbell?’

The dog he knows more than the others !!

This short book is almost an adult fairy tale. I was reminded of the opening of Quantum Leap, where it was said Sam, the main character, travelled within his own lifetime, and this is the case here. The title comes from a bottle his father has on his shelf. Whilst in the past, he saw his wife as a child and his parents it is the end of the war years, and there are references to this, and in the present when the book is set, it is around the time of the Iraqim war this is a sort of nod to the two wars. He uses movies as a way to time travel, the one about a lost Indian boy  the other films all seem to link to the book’s narrative. I like how he also changed the language from the Adult narrator, and the child narrator’s view of the world is very well done. This is a Swiss version of Quantum Leap but with the same character jumping as an adult and a kid to see the war over two different times. A playful, unusual book from a writer I would like to read more from. Have you read Urs Widmer?

Winston’s score – A – solid adult fairy tale of time travel.

Winter In Sockho by Elisa Shua Dusapin

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Winter in Sockho by Elis Shua Dusapin

Swiss fiction

Original title – Hiver à Sokcho

Translator – Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Source – personal copy

I picked this up in a charity shop recently as I am one to avoid hype books but when I read the book blurb again it grabbed me somewhat and the writer of the book Elisa Shua Duspain a writer from a french Korean background that grew up around Europe and had won a number of writing prizes including the National book prizes for the best-translated books. The book was popular when it came out and had a rather eyecatching book I am always wary of books that seemed hype but it is a short book perfect for sitting and reading on a winter day off so that is what I did today.

My mother was squatting in the kitchen, her chin pressed top her neck, arms plunged into a bucket. She was ixing fish liver, leeeks and sweet potato noodles to make the stuffing for the squid. Her soondae were known to be the best in Sockho.

“Watch me work the mixture. See how i spread the stuffing evenly”

Iwasnt really listening. Liquid was spurting from the biucket, pooling around our boots and running towards the drain in the middle of the room. My mother lived at the port, above the loading bay, in one of the apartments reserved for fishmongers. Noisy. Cheap.My childhood home. I went to see her on sunday eveninggs and stayed over until Monday, my day off off. She’d been finding it difficult sleeping alone since I’do moved out.

Her mother struggles with her not being there

The book follows a relationship between a young french Korean girl and a Fench comic artist that has come to stay at the Guesthouse where she has been working for the elderly owner. But now it is winter in the resort she is in is this summer resort that is like one of those western towns with tumbleweed getting blown around as the tourists have now gone and it is a ghost city as it is winter. so when Kerrand appears this older French man catches her eye, as he is the opposite of her boyfriend an airhead that is trying to forge a career as a model the fumbling embrace where see describes his hand touching a scar on her leg that scar which causes her to bite at this airhead as she expects him one day to ask her to change herself for him. This is heightened by a fellow guest that has had recent facial surgery laying low in the winter town. So as Kerrand gathers are narrator can speak french he asks her to introduce him to the real Korea as they take a road trip to the border she is more drawn to this man. Although she despairs at the fact he isn’t that into the food as her mother the other main person in this book is a woman that can prepare the deadly pufferfish. I was reminded of the Simpson’s episode where the chef had maybe wrongly cut up the fish that Homeer had eaten a fine line. They used to share a bed in her mother’s small apartment and she is starting to struggle as she is away most of the week working at the hotel. This is a young woman drawn to the mysterious older man as she dreams of him noticing her even more than he does. Will he write his comic book about the place?

Kerrand was listening to me intently, head down, one hand on his forehead tohold back his hair. The only display that had caught my attention was one with schoolchildrens shoes from the north along with Choco pies packaged in blue instead of their trademark purple. Were they the real thing? Did they actually have a cake inside or had they been specially made for the Musuem?

She is so drawn to this mysterious older man

I liked the descriptions in this book she caught that feel of a seaside town when the tourist have gone in the winter I remember visiting my grandparents that lived in a seaside town in winter it is an eerie place a place of spaces that was this is echoed in the narrator description of his drawings full of white spaces. The story is a classic older man younger woman with a boyfriend that isn’t all he seems I was reminded of Lost in Translation the connection between these two is less intense but the feel of them discovering places is the same as she views those places again when she goes with Kerrand. it works it hasn’t that feel of Woody Allen at times where the relationship between a young woman and the older man feels forced what effect has she had on Him if any? It is a perfect winter read it is a subtle take on a relationship like those french movies Amelie for example where her encounters are brief and intense like our narrators take on these days of visiting small conversations. What are your favorite books or films around brief encounters?

Winstons score – B+ a wonderful short read set in a dead seaside town.

Obscurity by Phillippe Jaccottet

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Obscurity by Phillippe Jaccottet

Swiss fiction

Original title – l’Obscurite

Translator – Tess Lewis

Source – personal copy

Lizzy Siddal is doing a Seagull books fortnight well I decide to choose the books I own I have downloaded the 28 free ebooks well the ones I didn’t have. This is the debut novel of one of the best known French-language poets. Phillippe Jaccottet has written a lot of short verse prose pieces about nature. I read this qi=uote translated from french on his wiki the Jaccotean writing is “an aesthetic of measure and of the unspoken that in a way summed up a lot of what I thought of his novel. He has also translated a number of poets and writers from various languages.

When I returned to our native country, several years had passed since I’d last seen my master – I called him this because under him I’d learnt the essentials of what guided me. It was he, in fact, who had imposed the separation- he fered, no doubt rightly, that i might confuse the two of us, that in fiollowing him to closelty. I would lose all sense of personal existence. Becaues I was on another continent anc he had almost completely given up all involven=ment in public life his retirement to the country allowerd him, in a sense, to extingush the splendour of his reputation – I’d heard nothing more aboput him. i didn’t even know if he was still alive.

The return of his disciple to the homeland ?

The book has two parts and reflects on the return of a disciple of a Philosopher. Who has spent many years in the city spreading the word of his master’s philosophy hen he left his master was a happily married man with children. so when he loses touch with him he chooses to return to the small town where his master lived. There he finds the family home has disappeared and his master is no longer about. He tries to find out what happened then he remembers that his master was a fan of a certain poet he then tells him of his master downfall and he tracks him to a single room where he finds a changed man the second part of the book is the struggle of master and disciple when the master has now decided that his views and ideas were wrong and has since dived into the dark the firey brilliant mind that has been destroyed by his master when he lost his with and he sees a man crumble by disbelief when all he values in his philosophy has been shown up death.

Again he remined silent for a long  time, as if he really were considering the question and his possible guilt or perhaps simply because he was overcome with fatigue. As for me, I was exhausted from the sadness, the discomfot, the strain of paying attentio. I had seen the lights in the window go out one after the other, except for one or two. the facades behind these windows would soon be nothing more than expansesof shadow of black. The glass ceiling iver the basement gleamed in spots. I asked permission to light the candle I’d notice on the mantlepiece, left there no doubt for the power filures that were frequent in these old buildings.

He gets the sorrow of what happened to his master whilst he was away.

This is a poetic work with no names or location it is two lives one that looked up at one then on the return after years of promoting and belief in his master that he saw as a brilliant mind a successful man with a set of beliefs that work has been broken. As it says in one part nothing is true,  nothing except the pain of knowing it. This shows what happens when time breaks down on man and builds another over time. this is one of the reasons I like Seagull books and other the last few years have been buying within my budget as many as I can as this isn’t a book that is commercially appealing as it is philosophical with very little details about the characters in a way I was reminded of Beckett Godot it is sometimes what isn’t said or is there that is what matters in this book. Have you read Jaccottet? I have another of his books on my shelves that I plan to read this fortnight.

The Pledge by Frederich Dürrenmatt

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The Pledge by Frederich Dürrenmatt

Swiss fiction

Original title – Das Versprechen

Translator – Joel Agee

Source – personal copy

I move on my german lit month reading to a new to me writer and a book that I have had a while and wanted to read. Frederich Durrenmatt was a multi-talented writer his theatre was often compared to that of Bertolt Brecht he was called the most original theorist. He was a critic of crime fiction and with this book he had worked on a crime script that he felt hadn’t a realistic ending this is the work he wrote as a result of that.as the subtitle goes a requiem for the detective novel.

Matthai had a hard time making senseof that jumbled report, the chief continued. “it was one of his old “clients” calling from Magendorf, a little hole in the wall near Zurich. The man was a peddlar named Von Gunten. Matthai wasn’t really in the mood to take this up this case on his last afternoon on his job. He had already brought his plane ticket, he’d be leaving in three days. But I was away at a conference of police chiefs and wasn’t expected back to the evening.

How Matthai is drawn in the case is by chance and meant his carreer never really ends

The book starts with a crime writer meeting the former head of Zurich Cantonal police who criticized his works as he says Chance plays no role in his works. So the writer then thinks up a new story and that is the main bases of the book that follows lieutenant Matthai. He is sent to find the killer of a small girl in a small town. The girl Gritli Moser was found in the woods killed with a razor. Matthai has to tell the parents about the loss of their small girl  . The crime was reported by von Gunten who found her but he is later convicted of something else and is connected to the two girls that earlier died in a similar way to Griti he is interviewed He then confesses. Matthai is just about to leave when he is drawn in another way by this case that initially then seemed shut as the young girl is buried but there is also the young girl’s drawings in the weeks and days before her death with images that may be known she may have known her killer? Matthai made a promise to get the killer and ends up running a petrol station to finally sort this case out or is it just a wild goose chase for this serial killer.

Back in Magendorf, Matthai met with his first difficulty. The emergency squad’s large van had driven into the village and was waiting for the inspector. The scene of the crim and its immediate vicinty had been carefully searched and cordoned off . Three plainclothes policemaen were hiding in the woods. Their assignment was to observe the passerbys. The rest of the squad was taken back to the city.

The other old crime novel cliche of the killer return ing to the scene of the crime here .

This shows the foibles of crime fiction and that is chance the obvious story Von Gunten fits that old inspector  Morse line that the person that finds the body may also be the killer. There is the picture pf the young girl that leads them in another direction what is the meaning of the hedgehog? What happens when you have got a confession and it was the wrong man it shows how someone can be haunted by that giving it all up to trap this killer to have that petrol station it is a strange twist in this book that shows how far one man will go with his pledge to the mother of the dead child. This is a book that reminds me of Paul auster at times another writer that has taken a different twist in his detective fiction this is a postmodernist crime novel that twists the tales and characters as far as you can. It has been made into a film I haven’t seen the recent us version but I believe it cuts a lot of the framing device out and resets the book in the US. The English version from the 90s seems near to the book and it has Richard E Grant in so I hope to watch that at some point.  Have you read this book? what do you think of the twists and turns in it ?

An answer from the Silence by Max Frisch

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An answer from the silence by Max Frisch

Swiss fiction

original title – Antwort aus der Stille

Translator – Mike Mitchell

Source – personal copy

I have twice before featured Max Frisch on the blog twice before those works were both out after the second world war and later works by Max Frisch. Now the fact that later in his life Frisch refused to have his earlier works in his collected works as he felt they didn’t represent his writing he in fact burnt the original manuscript of this book. So it hadn’t been widely read until this translation from Mike Mitchell. The book is said to have paralleled in some ways the change that Frisch took in his own life when he moved from a journalist too become an architect this was about the same time as he became a writer as well.

Or perhaops the solitary walker is thinking back. It’s a long valley and thirteen years is a long time ancd ge keeps going farther and farther back into his memory. Some things make him smile, a faint smile, either from embarassment and unacknowledged envy, it was at this wooden bridge that he told his grown-up brother , who had just got engaged, in youthfully open and impudent tones, that getting married was irdinary and that he, the seventeen year old, would never get married, for he wasn’t an irdinary person but an artist of inventoror something like that .

His first visit as he brother was in the same place as he is many years later .

This follows a few days in the life of Dr. Phil Balz Leuthold he is 30 years old and is due to marry his 21-year-old fiance Barbara. When he decides he wants to go and tackle the north ridge in the Alps this reminds him of a trip he took when he was much younger with he now in Africa married and distant older brother this is the opening as he remembers that trip with his brother.As he remembers he is by a stream and starts to carve a ship. He isn’t sure he is being watched by another person it is a Danish woman there to hike. Phil is embarrassed about the fact he was being like a child carving a ship. So he  then feels the need to impress her as he is drawn to this Danish women and her spirit they hike on and spend a night together this then makes Phil want to tactile the North ridge then he disappears for a number of days but what will happen to him will they find him what effect will it have on his life which of the two women in his life will he end up with !!

“Yes – the North Ridge”.

He sys it very modestly, very simply and natrually.But the young foreign woman desn’t know what it means; she doesn’t know she’s the first person he’s told and perhaps he’s telling her so there’s no way back for him; she just gets her knitting together, very calmlu as hi he’d been talking about some ordinary outing –

So he say himself that the North ridge was not supposed to be easy, at least no one has ever climbed it yet

And he wants to climb it now ?

The task he is facing the never climbed North Ridge

 

This is a novel of a turning point Phil hs lost his brother and is now facing that change from being a single man to being a married one so he goes to the Valley initially to clear his head but then thinking about his youth and the earlier visit to the same valley , he uses the lines that it felt smaller coming back which is something I think we can all associated with as we see things one way in youth and then another way ion adult how but then we still as adults want to cling to the past to that earlier summer by carving the shi. Then there is his indecision after meeting Irene in the valley and spending the night together that leads to him heading to the north ridge ! that time he spends there is what will shape his future his true turning point. I don’t understand why he distanced himself from this book in later life it is a great coming of age work.

Agnes by Peter Stamm

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Agnes by Peter Stamm

Swiss fiction

Original title – Agnes

Translator – Michael Hofmann

Source – review copy

I have reviewed Peter Stamm three times before on the blog over the years. so when I got the chance to review his debut novel I jumped at the chance as he is a writer whose works I had enjoyed his other books. Agnes had come out in the UK but was never brought out in the US so it gave me a chance to go back twenty years this book came out in 98 in Germany and 2000 in English for the first time. He has written several novels but was a journalist iuntially and has written radio plays as well.

I was back in the library early the next morning, and even though I was waiting for Agnes, I had no trouble concentrating on my work. I knew she would come, and that we would talk anc smoke and drink coffee together. In my head our relationship was already much further advanced than it was in reality. I was already wondering abouther, beginning to have my doubts, though we hadn’t even been out together.

I was working well, reading and making notes, When Agnes arrived, around noon and she nodded to me, Once again, she put her foam rubber cushion down on a chair near me, spread out her things as she had done yesterday, picked up a book and started reading

The beginning of the relationship as they keep meeting in the library sharing coffee and a smoke,

 

An older writer he is unnamed is asked by his younger girlfriend Agnes a cellist studying physics and free spirit in her own way to write a story about her. Our narrator is in Chicago to write about luxury trains. He does what Agnes wants and writes about their relationship He does that but as they are happy and the everyday life of these two. The way they meet and fell in love but this doesn’t lead to the most interesting story about their relationship. As they work together on the story. But, when she tells him she is expecting a baby the narrative changes as he is older and doesn’t want a child he tells her that he doesn’t want the child this is a turning point in their relationship. but also in the story, he is writing about there relationship changes as he starts in that narrative to try and control the younger woman by making her into what he wants her to be as the two worlds the story and real life start to come intertwined as the relationship cracks apart.

We celebrated Christmas Eve together. It was some time since I’d shown Agnes what I’d written. Now I printed out the story on white paper and put it in a folder with a dedication.

“I haven’t got an ending yet,” I said,”But as soon as I do.Ill have the whole thing boiund into a little book for you ”

Agnes had knitted me a sweater

“God knows,I had enough wool, she said.

“Black wool”

“No I had it dyed. Light blue doesn’t really suit you.”I didn’t say anything. We were sitiing on the sofa, with a little christmas tree in front of us that Agnes had decorated with only candles.

Later on the feeling between the two has changed in the story.

As ever Stamm is a master of describing how relationships work but hew also is great at getting that moment when the relationships change the turning point so to speak that unseen event at the start of the narrative that initally seems like the perfect relationship even thou there is an age difference. This sees the writer trying to idealize Agnes later in the book. This is maybe free in style than his later books it is like he is trying a different way of writing in this book it is looser than his other books. But worth reading I alwaylike to try and see how a writer has grown this isn’t as cut and cleaned as say seven years but is still an interesting insight into the dynamics of relationships and also about writing about a relationship which when it is good can seem very boring. Have you read this book?

 

The spirits of the earth by Catherine Colomb

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The Spirits of the Earth by Catherine Colomb

Swiss-French fiction

Original title – Les Esprits de la terre

Translator – John Taylor

Source – review copy via Tranalstor

II was contacted by John the translator of this novel as he felt it had fallen out of sight and shouldn’t have done. I agree as it is a clever little modernist novel. Catherine Colomb was orphaned when she was five and grew up in her grandparent’s house in the canton of Vaud where she spent most of her life. As it is elegantly put on her french Wiki page between old families and the parks, castles, lake, and vineyards of the region. Her four novels were all set in this region THis book came out in 1953.

In the hallways of Fraidaigue, one will henceforth have meet up with the dead Abrham attending to his transparent affairs while running into his mother whose head is topped off with some snowy construction, his sister isabelle surrounded by her suitors, and his deformed brother Ulysse pressinf a black marble inkpot against his chest with his dwarfed ar, . And Uncle Cesar? where Uncle Cesar ? HIs dear nephew has just fallen from the cornice and vanished !

This from the opening page remind me of Manderley and also I wondered if the name Ulysse was a nod towards Joyce ?

The book has a great intro by the translator himself that talks about Catherine life and the book the book has echoes of her own life as it has a lot of death and loss in it like she experienced at an early age. The book is set in two homes owned by the same family an older brother Cesar and his sister Zoe and two other brothers Eugene and Adolphe. The two brothers have been happily Married for a while and each lives at the families two properties. Fraidaigue John explains in his intro this means cold water and is the lakeside home of the family they also have Masion d’en Haut the families country estate. The book is a modernist work that follows these four lives and the deaths that happen in these families like their parents and nephews. It follows the family mainly through the eyes of Cesar a man that lost his closest friends when young and the world he lives in is filled with both the living and the ghost of those he once knew. He should be the head of the family but is just wandering the world as a victim.

Meanwhile, with the coming of spring, a strangely feverish Cesar was leaving the Masion d’en Haut and looking forward to seeing the naked pale purplish earth of the first vineyard; standing at the bottom of the Avenue, Melanie, watching him vanish, she placed her hand on her tumultuous breasts, squattering in front of the emerald green faience stove, all sisterlyaffection done away with and dressed in the white gown of insane women, Zoe was warming her fingers, with their overgrown nails, for the last time that season. When Cesar leaves. this means winter has given way, that the osier bushes are reddening at the edges of the stream, that the whole world is taking on the smell of th stables and manure

The world she knew so well is shown through how Cesar lives his life moving through the seasons from place to place never settling.

This is a high modernist novel in a way in his intro John says she was often compared to Woolf I can see this there is part of a world-changing like in Mrs. Dalloway where we see a woman look back over an evening over her life and the changing post world war. In this case, we see Cesar a man caught out of time drifting between the worlds of the living and dead. I’d like to suggest another writer I think inspired her maybe Du Maurier for me she often used her local Cornwall and Vaud both have the feeling of places caught out of time. The house in this book reminds me of the way Manderley is described in Rebecca the ghosts of those they have known is clinging to the walls of these houses. There is also the menace of what happened in these houses before in both books. John has done a poetic of her words he is mainly a Poetry translator and this shows how he has kept what at times are fragile narratives of a world between the living and dead.A touching and challenging read that has the reader wondering where they are for long after they put the book down.

Have you read this book or any other Swiss list books from Seagull books ?

To back of Beyond by Peter Stamm

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To back of beyond by Peter Stamm

Swiss fiction

Original title – Weit über das Land

Translator – Michael Hofmann

Source – library book

I usually try over the new year to catch some books that may be on the man Booker longlist. A good place to start is writers that have been on the list before so this is the first of two books I have got from the library from previous longlisted writers. Peter Stamm has won a number of prizes in Germany for his writing which is described as being sparse.I have reviewed his books twice before on the blog, he is a writer I feel could be on the longlist this year.

When astrid realized that Thomas wasn’t lying beside her, she would suppose he was already up, even though she almost invaribly got up first. She would go upstairs half asleep and wake the children and go downstairs again. Ten minutes later, freshly showered and in her robe she would emerge from the bathroom and call the children, who were bound to be still in bed. Konrad!Ella! Get a move on! If you don’t get up now, you’ll be late,Always the same sentence.

Astrid goes into auto mode when Thomas goes.

Like his other books, this has a moment at the start of the tale. The moment this book starts is when a perfect or so it seems couple Thomas and Astrid with their 2.4 children return from a perfect holiday in Spain. Next Day Thomas walks out of there house and starts to do a Forest Gump and walk around Switzerland. Meanwhile, his with Astrid is like a rabbit caught in headlights and just stays as she is covering for her missing husband.Thomas initially stays in a caravan then heads to the mountain trying to live off the land as best he can stumble into a brothel. Well, Astrid tries to help the children then she decides to let the world know what has happened. Why did Thomas escape, why hasn’t Astrid acted sooner? This is about keeping face in a way for Astrid there perfect life had tiny cracks in but they failed to see them.

It was daybreak when Thomas awoke.The moon was high, but it didn’t shed much light in the brightening sky. The group if trees that Thomas had seen as an outline the previous nightwere just a few sick specimens with leafless crowns, their trunks a tangle of ivy. A sweetish smell hung in the air.

Thomas clothes were sodden, but he didn’t feel cold. He rubbed his hands on the damp grass and wiped the sleep from his eyes .

Thomas is in a dream state at times .

This is a novella and touches on what modern life is about in a way. Those who like Thomas just drift off this isn’t quite Christopher Mccandless into the wild Thomas isn’t making a point in a way he seems  more hunting for what is seldom seen these days in our towns and cities and that is as Kierkegaard said “I found I had less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen.I discovered in silence, the voice of God. Maybe not quite God, but Thomas is seeking that clarity it brings to people sometimes. Their life isn’t all it seems this is classic Stamm in a way he has a way of going under the veneer of modern life. He has a way of placing his characters into situations using a starting point.Like in seven years he uses a classic storyline a man leaving his family in a mid-life crisis a Reg Perrin or Frank Bascombe life falling apart. What is your favourite Peter Stamm book?