Tag: swiss fiction

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?

 

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.

About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler

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About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler

Swiss Fiction

Original title – D’oncle

Translator – Jordan Stump

Source – Subscription

I have been remiss on Peirene books the last couple of years I had reviewed virtually every one in their first few years. But over the last few years, I haven’t gotten to their books, even though I am now a subscriber to their books. It isn’t that their recent books haven’t appealed. They always do. They usually come and recently have drifted down the TBR. But this when it arrived intrigued me. It won the Swiss literature prize but it was the description of the book being something different. I was reminded of that Early peirene, especially the mention of a seaside town as that was in the first year’s books. It also reminds me of why I love books in translation sometimes, which is absurd. Odd little books like this are subtle and, in many ways, have little happening. I feel this is the sort of book that would struggle to get put out here.

Uncle’s house is in a little hamlet looking onto the ocean, and it’s a white house with pale blue shutters lashed by the salty wind from the bay, a house whose walls are being eaten away by the ivy we used to pull down every summer as a family activity, knowing there was no point, knowing the ivy would be back the next year, covering the walls with shadows and indelible stars, and of course we should have dealt with it earlier, should have kept an eye on that destructive greenery’s growth, but in those days we were only holidaymakers, transients, part-tim-ers, and we couldn’t expect Uncle to see to that job, because Uncle likes ivy, he thinks it makes the house look like a haunted house,

The uncles house by the sea where they look after him.

We hear from the nice Uncle. Mainly, she explains the world they live in but also how they got there along the way. We open with the said uncle trying to escape down the toilet. He is an injured veteran. He is a shut-in in barring his occasional visits on a moped to the local bar. He is also a drinker, hoarder and injured using crutches also. Whenever he gets away from his family, he causes trouble. This is the tale of the family, the history of how the grandparents, then their own mother, all over time came to look after her uncle, and now she and her brother are stuck in this house with this drunk veteran. He is a terror, but there is also a sense of love and duty in how she talks about him at times; he is absurd as a character larger than life, and in the predicaments, he gets himself a little mad at times. I loved this. It is one of those books poetic about the hardness of supporting a person who has spent most of their life as a shut-in and how, in a way, that had made his niece and nephew the same as they had to be there even before they became his carers.

Ever since their father died my mother and Uncle have remembered him with a sort of reverence, and they made a kind of funerary scarecrow that’s supposed to be him, and what it is is a bolster pillow dressed in a kaftan and a sailor’s cap that presides over the attic, and actually I suspect it was my uncle who initiated the project of the paternal effigy, because the handyman spirit was passed down from father to son, along with a fondness for practical jokes, and I’m not sure Uncle is capable of changing a lightbulb but I know he likes doing little repairs and renovations, for example he regularly restuffs the armchairs with newspaper, or when the sole of his old tennis shoe starts to come away he sticks it back on with super glue.

I loved this full of love and also questioning him at the same time.

I think this has a film written all other it is one of those quirky French films that is comic, absurd, and sad all at the same time. I imagine Bruno Dumonth tackling this with his love of quirky characters. Uncle has a little of what I loved about the characters in Father Ted. He is like a French father, Jack. How they describe him escaping or going on the moped reminds me of some of the storylines in Father Jack, that sort of rural absurd nature of life sometimes. This is a book about Family but also how if one person in that family falls or, like an uncle in this case, has maybe some sort of PTSD characteristics in his life and world, the habits may point to that. I think this reminded me of what I loved in the early Peirene. Have you a favourite book from Peirene.

Winstons score – A a quirky tale of a shut in uncle and his family that care for him and his mad world

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.

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.

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.

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?

Behind the station by Arno Camenisch

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Behind the station by Arno Camenisch

Swiss fiction

Original title – Hinter dem Bahnhof

Translator – Donal Mclaughlin

Source – personal copy

I feature the first book in the trilogy Arno Camenisch wrote The alp earlier this month. I had ordered this book first but when it arrived and I saw that it was the second book I decided to order the Alp. Which is the book he got more acclaim for? Though this book style wise is similar in tone to the other book.The third part of the book has also been translated into English. But I haven’t got a copy yet.

My Grandfather has seven and a half fingers. On his left hand he has five fingers. on his right hand, he has the thumb, the index finger and half a middle finger> Thats two and half fingers that are missing, he took off at the big band saw. He wears his wedding ring on the left ring finger. Nonno coughs and says, bot, don’t come to close to the band saw on me, or do you want your fingers pff. Nonno is the master of the band saw.

This echoed a [passage in the alp about missing fingers and maybe the harsh nature of life.

Like the Alp, this is a book set in a small alpine village of forty or so people. It is told from the point of view of a young boy. Who lives there with his brother and observes the world they live in. like in the earlier book” the alp “, this is a gritty view of alpine life for those less well off. A tale of village life growing up without any real hope in your heart. Also although through child’s eyes you see the tough nature of the world of his parents and even more so of his grandparents.Especially with the grandfather’s illness, a real feeling of hope is failing as the chief patriarch. This is tough as the narrator is only five years old elsewhere we see him and brother get into a number of scraps the brother falls the two get stuck in one part. A bleak internal look at the alpine life devoid of hope in many ways but also full of the wonderful quaint ways of village life.

We’ll have to spend the night in the chair lift and will miss Scaccia pensieri on tv tonight, my brother says, and mother will have to flush the rice and beetroot down the toilet. The last of the Chupa chups have also gone when we hear my father calling, the helicopter’s on its way. My brother looks at me. Behind the blue panes in his ski glasses, his eyes look like those of a fish. I don’t beleive it, I say , my father’s bored and joking for sure, there are no HelioKopter round here. My brother says, Maybe the heliokopter really is coming and it’ll throw us down rucksacks with new Chupa Chups and salami and cucumber sandwiches so we don’t get hungry during the night.

Somthung child like in this pasage but also harsh realism of the diet of the poor alpine people.

Like in the first part of the trilogy the names of the characters are just Family names so brother, father, mother aunt, uncle etc. The only people that we do see k=named are Italian immigrants that work the land. This is a very baron view of the world told from the internal thoughts of our nameless narrator. if Peter from the Hiedi stories had a novella written by Thomas Bernhard this would be near it there is a bitter undertow of hopelessness the village is like in the alp with the similar characters a place caught out of time with the surrounding world and our narrator even thou young could even have been like a Dickens child character for the way he viewed the world. There is a similar bleak nature to the likes of the young Oliver or even more so Pip as they both share a bleak world the world of the village of Oberlander is similar to that of Pips Marshland home.

Isle of the dead by Gerhard Meier

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Isle of the dead by Gerhard Meier

Swiss fiction

Original title – Toteninsel

Translator – Burton Pike

Source – personal copy

I said at the start of German lit month the new job has given me a little extra money to buy some second-hand copies for this year’s challenge. I got this book last year. But finally read it again, last week. As Gerhard Meir belongs with writers like Bernhard and Walser writers that need a couple of readings. Meier is by trade a designer and it wasn’t till he was ill and in his forties, he took up writing.He got a lot of recognition when Peter Handke shared his Franz Kafka prize money with him. He lived in a small village and avoided the limelight.

“I like to walk through this part of town,- Do you see a;; those things over there? Discarded parts from building the railroad, presumably. And through them the sky, at times bare, overcast, putting on its stars:Firefly-lights abouve the field full of parts.I like walking through it. And if I were a photographer, Bindschadle, these iron bones would be sold commercially so people could decorate their walls with them.

I loved this description as the bones of an industral past how often I walk [past these in Chesterfield!

This is a short novella of hundred pages. It follows two old guys Baur, now he is the talker of the two. Bindschadler is the quiet one, although I sense he has just got used to speaking when it is worth it and letting Baur fill the gaps. The two have been friends since they were in the army at a young age. The two wander along the river and talk the things that matter to the pair of them like art, writing and writers. The way the hometown has changed over the years .But as they talk the events and time they talk about drift and they seem caught in a past that has gone and like the title of the book which is a famous picture of an island that is rather unclear and has a number of different versions also is the cover is homage to the picture of the Isle of the dead . They are maybe an isle of a dead world in the words.

“Thus Bindschadler, one could say that Bartok’s music brings groves of plane trees to ballet dancing, bringing in what’s around them, while prayer moves mountains or wakes the dead, even when their bones lie neatly ordered in the eartg, which according to the usual opinon, is the right place for them,” Baur said

We followed the path accross the Dnnern meadow. Antonioni’s tennis scene from Blow-up came to mind, which was mimed without a tennis ball; saw the green of the court, which in the ligh from the searchlights appeared especially green

Bones agian a rcurring theme at times also the falk of music and film here.

If Samuel Beckett had ever been asked to an episode of last of the summer wine this would have been how it would have turned out. The Isle of the dead is considered a masterpiece of Swiss modernist fiction and has echoes of the like of Bernhard in the way he viewed the art world. Joyce as they walk he use the places around them as a metaphor for a changing world. This is a slow meandering book the talk is beautiful from the two full of subtle details like a macro lens on the lives the details they give away are so defined in the conversations between the two. The way two objects or animals get a symbiotic relationship the shared past of these two is like the intertwining of the branches of two great trees that is keeping them together but also from falling over.

The Alp by Arno Camenisch

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The Alp by Arno Camenisch

Swiss fiction

original title – Sez Ner

Translator – Donal McLaughlin

Source – personal copy

Another new name for the blog. As I searched for books for this years German Lit month. Dalkey Archive has published a number of the leading Swiss writers over the last few years. This book is one of a number from that series I have bought over the last year or so. Arno Camenisch burst on to the scene when this book came out in both German and Rhaeto- Romanic. It was the first of a trilogy he wrote about rural Swiss life.

The farmhand has eight fingers, five on his left hand, and three on his right. His right he keeps mostly in his pocket, or resting on his thigh beneath the table.When he lies in the grass outside the hut, next to the pigpen, fast asleep with hos boots off and his socks off as well, the swineherd counts his toes.The farmhand sleeps in the afternoons as, by night, he’s out and about.He vanishes when everyone’s gone to bed, come back at some point during the night.

Thje loss of fingersshows the tough nature of the work these four men do.

When I took a picture of this book on twitter I called it the Anti Heidi. As for me, it portrays the Swiss rural community like it is, in many ways similar to the rural world of England.And that is a hard life for many of the people who work the land. The story is told by four unnamed characters they are the Dairyman, his farmhand, a cow herder and swine herd. What we see is the hardness of there lives the days they live milking herding animals. The jokes shared like if one hadn’t a dog he’d be a swineherd man.This is all told as we see tourist making the most of the Alps and the rich farmers. They read about a glorious past and another has just a fork to eat with. The tying of milk stools to their waist to sit on whilst milking is an ancient scene at times there world seems old-fashioned it is only when the modern world breaks in we see when the book is set.

The day-trippers wash off their walking boots in the fountain outside the hut.They take their shoes off, and their sweaty socks. The day-trippers sit at the edge of the fountain with their feet in the basin, The diop their dirty soles of their shoes in the water, use their finger to dig the dirt out of the sole. Thanks a lot,they say when the swineherd brings them a cup of milk, no worries,don’t mention it,, the swineherd says.That’s for the dirt in the fountain he thinks to himself.

The fountain they use t wash and drink from is used by trippers to clean their boots and socks …

There is a feeling that places change and sometimes people in that world don’t change. These four characters seem like flies caught in the amber of their time. Their lives are unchanging but shrinking as the modern world automates farming the feeling is these four men may be the last of the generation but there is also a deep sorrow in Camenisch portrayal of their world.Alongside a black humour that one only ever finds in these tightly knitted worlds of farm hands, miners, fishermen or shipyard workers. Those doing a day work that can see the funny side of the darkest parts of lives. I lived for many years in the northeast of England,  worked with a group of old people. The characters here reminded me in many ways of the way these four characters talked. An eye-opening view of alpine life. The real Heidi character in the modern world.

Year of the Drought by Roland Buti

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Year of the drought by Roland Buri

Swiss fiction

Original title – Le Milieu de l’horizon

Translator – Charlotte Mandell

Source – personnel copy

I saw a few reviews around the web a few weeks ago of this book.One from Melissa  and another from Grant it sounded like a book I would like.So I went and brought a copy for myself. It won the Swiss literature in 2014. Roland Buti studied history and became a history teacher in his hometown of Lausanne he has written a number of novels .But this is his first book to be translated into English.

Rudy was the son of a distant cousin in Seeland. He had come to live in our house before I was born.For me he had no age, as if he had never been a child  and would never grow old. His ruddy thick skin was a barrier that kept him separate from the outside world and this seemed to me part of a very particular form of bearitude that was his alone.

When I was right, I learned that he had Down’s syndrome,By then I had realised that Rudy’s status in our family was different from mine and my sister’s

Rudy remind me in some ways of Lennie from” of mice and men”

This is a story set in that hot summer of 1976 in a small swiss valley in the french speaking part of Switzerland. We follow this summer through the eyes of Gus the son of the farm that lives in the valley a rural and isolate place he lives there with his Father A big strong farming man , iut one that is trying to rescue the farm out of the hole it is drifting into due to the Summer. Jean the father does this by getting chickens but with the summer heat as the temperature inches up the dead chickens start piling up . The mother a stand offish woman who has led a sheltered life and wants her kids to have more . A sister Lea a musician then we have a cousin a lad with Downs that is struck by every woman he runs into maybe the woman for him. But he ends up in trouble, he remind me in some ways of Steinbeck’s great character Lennie. The summer isn’t going great when Cecile an old friend of the mother appears she sets the young man alight at first when he caught her one night in a night-gown, but then sees her with his own mother. But elsewhere Gus has awakenings with his friend Maddy as his world starts to fall apart and his father Jean starts to collapse as a man in front of his eyes as his farm and marriage implode in Heat and they year of the drought.

The dead hens in the dry grass looked as though they had never been animals. The stunted, twisted , pale bodies  were no longer part of nature; they were different from the assorted rubbish at the municipal dump.The anicent pact has been broken.

The farm is like the dead chickens and the Pact with the land has been broken by this summer.

This was compared to the seethaler novel a whole life . But this is much more a glimpse of that moment when a boy becomes a man. Also in the way Seethaler caught a world dying this is the end of a farm like the dead chickens drying in the sun and smelling out the place its a rotting corpse of a farm. This also follows Gus starting to notice the other sex , but also maybe seeing the cracks in the world around him for the first time. Buti build the tension , I was also reminded of Steinbeck in the way you see Jeans efforts as hopeless trying to get by but failing was a trait in Steinbeck’s books. A perfect summer read this book but as Grant says some of the images in the book will stick in the mind with you.

 

Barbarian Spring by Jonas Lüscher

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9781908323835

Barbarian Spring by Jonas  Lüscher

Swiss fiction

Original title – Frühling der Barbaren

Translator – Peter Lewis

Source – review copy

For two hands, of stone and of thyme
I dedicate this song.. For Ahmad, forgotten between two butterflies
The clouds are gone and have left me homeless, and
The mountains have flung their mantles and concealed me
..From the oozing old wound to the contours of the land I descend, and
The year marked the separation of the sea from the cities of ash, and
I was alone
Again alone

A verso of the Poem Ahmad Al-Za’tar by Mahmoud Darwish , seems to fit the feeling of this book .

 

Another novel from switzerland for German lit month and another from Haus publishing( I love the cover of this book a very german looking cover sparse just what is need on it )  .Jonas  Lüscher was born in Berne , and studied Philosophy , getting a master’s degree first teaching , since then he also did some work alongside the well-known philosopher Michael Hampe .Barbarian spring is his first novel it was shortlisted for the swiss book prize and longlisted in the German book prize .

Preising was all set , then , to exchange the fogs of midland Switzerland for the balmey Tunisian spring .He swapped his customary tweed jacket and Burgundy cords for a houndstooth jacket the colour of egg nog and a pair of chinos with sharp creases ; in all honesty, he found this ensemble ludicrous , but his housekeeper had laid it out ready for him and he was afraid of offending her by spurning it .

I was reminded of Frasier this is just the sort of thing he would do they worry about it .

Barbarian spring is really a double meaning in its title , the first being an older word for the Arab world and the Arab spring , the second and main one is the spring of a group of people who should know better that become barbaric in the face of the Arab spring happening around them .The story is the story of Preising a Swiss industrialist and rather like  a swiss version of Frasier or Niles from the programme Frasier as he is very picky in his ways .We meet him on route to a wedding of two friends from London they are getting married in a resort in Tunisia that has been built-in an Old Berber town and made into the height of western opulence as a hotel the couple haven’t spared any expense the bride arrives in her wonderful dress on the back of a camel  .The marriage goes ahead , but even as Preising is arriving for the Marriage you sense not all is right in the world around them .Add to this the crash in the markets  in London where the couple are from at this time as well .We have two groups living on the edge and a group of overpaid rich people getting  caught up in the Arab spring .

Sitting in the shade , Snaford started talking about the niceties of the Berber village societies and the role played by women , and preising , who’d read a bit about native peoples , chipped in from time to time .

Preising and one of the guests talk about the natives , but see the world from a western view .

Now this book is a story of what may have happened but what could have happened of course the two events in the book the Arab spring and the Market crashes happened a different times but what Jonas does in the book is imagine them happening in a future event and how this has a knock on effect on the Couple , their party and Preising .But also the people in the Resort around them those everyday Tunisians .This of course leads to the darker side of human nature taking hold not just survival but also what happens when there are no rules for everyone and effectively we are all on the same level for once caught in  a storm of events .Also certain scenes show one world smashing into another like a luxury coach crashing into a group of camels , in one way the part in the coach unhurt and the family that own the camel destroyed by this one event .Short but thought-provoking fiction , using an outside eye on recent events like the market crashes and Arab spring make for an exciting and different debut novel .

have you read any books about the Arab spring ?

The Truth about the Harry Quebert affair by Joël Dicker

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the truth about the Harry Qubert affair

The truth about the Harry Quebert affair by Joël Dicker

Swiss fiction

Orginal title La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert

Translator – Sam Taylor

Source – review copy

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita via goodreads

 

Well in the UK ,you bound to have seen this about it has been really pushed by Waterstones book shop here , which is good to see so often translated fiction doesn’t get the front windows or main tables in book shops .So to Joël Dicker ,he is Swiss writer ,he was born and schooled in Geneva ,he went to Paris to study for a year after school ,then returned and completed a degree in law in Switzerland ,he has always written this his first book has been a runaway success in Europe .it won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens Grand Prix du Roman de l’Academie Francaise prizes .

“He wrote that book for that girl , Marcus .For a fifteen-year-old girl .I can’t leave the plaque there .That’ not love – it’s disgusting .”

“I think it’s more complicated than that ,” I said .

“And I think you should keep your nose out of this , Marcus .You should go back to New York and stay far away from all this ”

Marcus is told to leave the Harry Quebert affair alone .

 

So what is the book about ,well it is told in two main time lines the first is in the summer of 1975 ,when the character of the title Harry Quebert is spending the summer in Somerset in New Hampshire ,finishing a book which he feels will cement his places as one of the best writers around  his book the origins of evil is maybe more than it first seemed .During this  time he befriends a young girl Nola Kellergran .Now she disappears at the end of this summer this brings us to the other timeline .For 33 years ,later her body is discovered in the yard of the house Harry Quebert was staying in that summer and she is holding a copy of Harry Quebert manuscript.This is where we meet Marcus Goldman ,now he  is a writer just starting his journey as a writer and was taught by Harry Quebrt so he decides to go to Somerset and find pout what really happened and prove that the man he knew so well isn’t the killer and get him free as Harry Quebert now sits in Jail .Along the way the Life of Nola Kellerman isn’t as simple or clean as it once seems as Marcus uncovers more and more about the men she was involved with that summer and what she was really doing .Does he find the killer ,does Harry walk free and what about the two books Harry’s and Marcus’s about Harry’s case ?

The masterpiece I had so desperately wanted to write …. Harry had written it .He had sat at a table in a diner and written words of absolute genius , wonderful sentences that had moved the whole country ,taking care to hide within his work the story of his love affair with Nola Kellergran

The Origins of Evil was Harry’s masterpiece and the book he was writing that summer .

Now this book is great for a début but you do feel after finishing it a good edit and maybe a few changes would have moved it into that instant classic band .But that said it is a wonderful Homage to all things America now Maclehose have gone with a Hopper painting for the cover here and yes this is the america of Hopper and Rockwell .What Joël Dicker has done is taken parts of recent American culture and mixed them so we have part of Twin peaks Nola Kellergran is rather like Laura Palmer in that the more the book unfolds like in the tv show twin peaks the more we gather she isn’t what she first seemed .Part Stephen King that New England and the small town of Somerset could have walked out of a king novel .Part Cold Case drama now I could pick one shpow out but there is a number of shows and books about Cold crime case solving Marcus Goldman is the classic writer turned detective .Part Lolita how many men were attracted to this young women ? Now this book also struck me as part written for a film or tv series ,now that isn’t a bad thing is it ,I mean stephen King has done it for years ,so keep your eyes out for a version of this for a film ,I would love to see a great director get this book in the hands of the likes of David Lynch or Wim Wenders it would really bring out  the darker side of the book out .So I look forward to seeing what Joël Dicker does next ?