Gillian, a TV commentator and drama school graduate, has just begun to regain consciousness in the hospital following an accident which has killed her husband Matthias, the editor of a magazine, and as her memory of blue water and empty space comes and goes, she alternates between awareness of her surroundings and complete befuddlement. The impact of the crash has destroyed her face, and it will be many surgeries and many months before it can be rebuilt. She and her husband, both intoxicated, had been quarreling because he had found a long-forgotten roll of film hidden in her desk, had had it developed, and had discovered that the film contained nude pictures for which she herself had posed. Already jealous about her career, her friendships, and her easy conversations with those she interviewed, Matthias was outraged – “no one took him seriously” – and went on to embarrass her at a party, later refusing to let her drive home, though he was even more intoxicated than she. Now he is dead, and she will not have a real face for six months, at least. What follows in this novel of relationships by Swiss author/dramatist Peter Stamm is a vibrant story of love with its many complications, as damaged people, including Gillian, try to rebuild their lives and find some sort of peace. Time is fluid here, as memories intrude for Gillian, and as Stamm, dramatist that he is, recreates much of her life in vivid scenes of natural and revelatory dialogue. The novel speeds along, helped by some humor, which highlights the absurdities in the characters’ lives.
Read Full Post »
Posted in 7-2014 Reviews, Australia, Book Club Suggestions, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Psychological study, Social and Political Issues, Switzerland on Jan 4th, 2014
Winner of the prestigious Patrick White Award in her native Australia, Christina Stead (1902 – 1983), acclaimed in England and Australia, still remains unknown to most readers in the United States, and that’s a shame. Her 1973 novel The Little Hotel, given to me by a friend from England, reveals her deliciously twisted sense of humor, her pointed social satire, and her vividly depicted but often very sad characters, and I am now poring through Amazon’s Marketplace listings to find as many of her other sadly neglected novels as I can. In this novel, set in a small hotel on Lake Geneva in the immediate aftermath of World War I, Stead introduces an assortment of bizarre characters who live at the small Hotel Swiss-Touring for various lengths of time, some of them for a season, and a few as residents. Most of them are there because they cannot afford the more elegant accommodations to which they have been accustomed, though the twenty-six-year-old hotelkeeper, Selda Bonnard, and her slightly older husband Roger do their best to meet their guests’ needs. Touring artists associated with a local nightclub, and the road companies that play the casino, also occupy the hotel, residing on another floor above the guests. All of Stead’s characters are flawed, and as all are shown in intimate scenes in which they reveal themselves, at least to the reader, they inspire a kind of empathy within the reader – and even a kind of pervading sadness – which does not often happen within social satire, which is usually characterized by sterotypes.
Read Full Post »
An author revered as much for the controlled lyricism of his prose as for his careful attention to details of the natural world, his uncompromising characterizations, and his ability to incorporate subtle symbols, Swiss author Jacques Chessex (1934 – 2009) was the first foreign citizen to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. In this dramatic novel, he tells the story of Jean Calmet, a thirty-eight-year-old schoolteacher, whose physician father has just died and with whom he has had a fraught relationship. The youngest of five children, Jean both loved and feared his father, with good reason, and he is glad that his father has been cremated, rather than buried. “The doctor would be reduced to ashes. He could not be allowed any chance of keeping his exasperating, scandalous vigour in the fertile earth,” Jean thinks. “Make a little heap of ashes of him, ashes at the bottom of an urn. Like sand. Anonymous, mute dust.” As the family gathers to choose an urn, Jean meditates on his father’s relationships with the whole family, and especially on his own chances for a life of his own. With no emotional resources of his own to sustain him, even by the age of thirty-eight, he is a completely lost soul, someone ready to become a victim of others, if not himself.
Read Full Post »
Swiss author Peter Stamm has accomplished a remarkable feat. He has written a fascinating story in which marriage is less the result of true love than it is of logic, the resulting union resembling a merger more than a deep human relationship. Passion here has more to do with self-gratification than with true feeling. And Alex, the main character, is so ego-centric that it is difficult to imagine any thoughtful, sensitive woman wanting to have anything at all to do with him. But that is part of the point. None of the three main characters here—one man and his two lovers–are emotionally mature, and none of them grow much during the almost twenty years that pass in the course of this novel. Still, by the end of the novel, the reader will have a fine picture of what true love is, however negatively the characters behave in their own lives and however much damage they may do to the other people in their lives. The negative emphasis actually accentuates the wonder of the positive for the reader. Tightly organized and unusual in its focus on characters who are insensitive and self-involved, the novel has more intellectual than emotional appeal (again, appropriate to the characters), and it is up to the reader to decide to what extent each will be able to understand and feel real love—or become fully human.
Read Full Post »
In this brutally satiric little novella, the “downstairs” servants of the aristocratic Klopstocks, living in Switzerland, have their lives all planned out for the immediate future. They will not be spending another day with the Klopstocks—at least not a day in which the Klopstocks are alive, and they are breathless with anticipation. Lister, who manages the household, knows that both the Baron and the Baroness will be meeting in the library that evening with Victor Passerat, “Mister Fairlocks,” someone with whom the Baroness is passionately in love but who is himself passionately in love with the Baron. Posting a “Not to Disturb” sign on the door, the triangle of lovers meets, determined to settle their issues, but these can be settled only one way—with gunshots. “The eternal triangle has come full circle,” one servant observes.
Read Full Post »
