Swiss Literature

In this eerie, compelling, and playful novel, a young man tormented by his feeble memory meets an elderly man, Robert, endowed with the recall of an elephant. Soon, in exchange for becoming his live-in servant, Robert agrees to allow his young protégé to inherit his prodigious memory upon his death. While this might seem a fair if absurd exchange, Robert's demands become progressively more macabre, until the narrator is forced to decide what he is truly willing to sacrifice for the ability to remember. The debut novel of Bernard Comment, acclaimed author and editor, now available in English for the first time, The Shadow of Memory brings a fairy-tale premise into the modern world, where information-and its loss-can be a matter of life and death.

Having abandoned his wife, life, family, and homeland, the narrator of My Year of Love flees to Paris to begin his life over again, and finds himself having to rescue himself from the freedom he believed he desired: "I would never have believed that freedom could be a form of captivity, freedom can be like a primeval forest or like the ocean, you can drown in it or disappear and never, never ever find your way out again..." With a combination of confession, complaint, and sensual detail, a break is made with the narrator's past, and through writing this very novel the days of his year of love find an order and expression.

"I can assure you that no movie will ever achieve the speed of prose. Human beings just haven't realized that yet." -Jürg Laederach. With tongue resolutely in cheek, saxophonist, critic, poet, and one-time enfant terrible of Swiss literature Jürg Laederach here pursues the ambition of forcing all of human existence into a single novel. The Whole of Life tells the story of a man, Robert "Bob" Hecht, in three sections: "Job" about work and looking for work; "Wife" about sex during a bout of impotence; and "Totems and Taboos," in which Bob himself ruminates on the limitlessness of human limitation. In Life, space is compressed to the suffocating dimensions of a single mind, while single moments are expanded cubistically into entire landscapes. Bodies are vivisected and reassembled, and language is invaded, exploded, and reassembled. The Whole of Life sees Laederach composing a novel by taking it apart as he goes.

The narrator of Volatile Texts: Us Two falls in love with Pierre, the book's secret protagonist. During their trysts she rediscovers Switzerland, a place where every valley has its own language and every person is translated. It's a perfect microcosm of Europe-a collection of accents, languages, and landscapes. Volatile Texts is Zsuzsanna Gahse's ironic and prescient meditation on a Europe that is disintegrating in the same way that the Alps disintegrate into individual lakes and valleys. Yet language itself is the true subject of these prose miniatures, which are volatile and unstable because they expose language as an arbitrary construct made of interchangeable parts; however, this is also what makes the book such an exciting read.

When Quentin's lover announces that she's leaving him for his brother and moving to America, he replies spontaneously that he too is leaving the country: but going where? To Tahas, he improvises: "a city whose very name sounded exotic." Following through on this impulse, Quentin soon finds a job exactly where he claimed to be going ... and with his departure from familiar Europe, finds himself aimless in a desert country equal parts dull and dreamlike, enclosed in "the Ring" to which the wealthy expatriate community is confined by its own xenophobia. Stifled within this community and alienated without, Quentin must decide what sort of life is worth living-safe and aloof, or engaged with the deprivation and even danger of what lies beyond the Ring.

Scrounged from his notebooks and hearsay, this is the story of a schoolteacher named Konrad Zündel: a philosopher, a want to-be writer; scattered, self-conscious, glum, anxious, unlucky, discontent...At the end of his rope, he decides to flee his workaday life at all costs, only to find escape always a little beyond his reach. First, his tooth falls out in the sight of other travelers, then he finds a severed finger in a restroom on a train. In fact, Zündel seems on the verge of falling to bits, as do his words, thoughts, wife, and world-will there be anything left, and anyone to hold the pieces. Zündel's Exit is a Chaplinesque comedy of disintegration, never knowing if it's coming or going.