Tag: Swiss lit prize

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

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.