The Gilded Chalet: Off-Piste in Literary Switzerland - Hardcover

Rooney, Padraig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857886364 ISBN 13: 9781857886368

Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2016

Synopsis

In the summer of 1816 paparazzi trained their telescopes on the goings on of poets Byron and Shelley - and their womenfolk - across Lake Geneva. Mary Shelley babysat and wrote Frankenstein. Byron dieted and penned The Prisoner of Chillon. His doctor, Polidori, was dreaming up The Vampyre. Together they put Switzerland on the map.

Switzerland has always provided a refuge for writers attracted to it as an escape from world wars, oppression, tuberculosis... or marriage. While often for Swiss writers from Rousseau to Bouvier the country was like a gilded prison or sanatorium. The Romantics, the utopians (Wells, D. H. Lawrence) and other spiritual seekers (Hesse), viewed Switzerland as a land of milk and honey, as nature's paradise. In the twentieth century, spying in neutral Switzerland, spawned espionage and detective fiction from Conan Doyle to Maugham, Fleming, and Le Carré.

Padraig Rooney finds the rooms crammed with curios: lederhosen and Lepidoptera, spas and spies, fool's gold and numbered accounts. Literary detective work and treasure chest, history and scandal, The Gilded Chalet will make you strap on your skis and go off-piste to find out the real Swiss story.

About this title

About the Author

Padraig Rooney was born in Ireland and studied at Maynooth College and at the Sorbonne. When he was sixteen he first came to Switzerland, saw the Rolling Stones in Berne, and never looked back. He has lived in Switzerland for fifteen years, and teaches English at International School Basel. He worked as a freelance travel writer for many years, for the Irish Times, Irish Press, Sunday Tribune, Bangkok Post, and many Asian magazines.

www.padraigrooney.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

My compatriot James Joyce eloped from Ireland in borrowed boots in 1904. He fled both world wars to the safety of Zürich. War too caught the fifteen-year-old Borges in Geneva, where his dad arranged for the boy to get laid. Ian Fleming was recovering from a dose of the clap. The seventeen-year-old John Le Carré turned spy in Berne and polished his German. It would prove useful. For all of them Switzerland was a hideout, a refuge, the quiet good place.
Switzerland took writers in, sometimes grudgingly, often with good grace. It gave them a room with a view and a place at the table maybe not the Stammtisch, but you can’t have everything. Service was brisk and efficient, the wine not too bad, the food rough and ready but nourishing. Demi-pension.

You’re a writer, are you? We’ve had a few of those.

And the writers responded by doing what they do best: reportage, poems, horror fiction, travelogue, novel, detective fiction, great modern masterpiece, murder mystery. Biting the hand that fed them. Pointing out the dry rot. Suggesting there’s a smell under the floorboards. Often enough writers just got on with it - up some secluded valley or in a flat in Münchenstein. From time to time there was fruitful exchange between the local scribblers and the blow-ins. But this being Switzerland they kept a wary eye on each other, knowing they might just be passing through, merely taking shelter from the storm.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1857886364
• ISBN 13: 9781857886368
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320