Synopsis
A bracing and darkly comic novel about a disgraced priest who finds himself haunted by his dead and disapproving father, this little-known classic of Swiss literature is impossible to forget.
In a small town in Switzerland, Franz—ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends—is being haunted by his recently deceased father, Klement. In life, Franz was caught cheating on his wife and defrocked, after which Klement never spoke to him again. In death, Klement visits his son in the form of a frog in the throat, choking him, yes, but also giving voice to an old dairy farmer devoted to the old ways, forever railing against his son and the whole modern mess he represents.
The same can be said of this novel, in which these two voices clash, harmonize, and ultimately offer up all the mutual recognition and incomprehension that is family life. A miniature tragicomic masterpiece, Markus Werner’s second novel is as bursting with life as a Dickens novel: not only Franz’s high-strung shenanigans and the father’s settled life among the cattle, but the lives of his sister and brother and the land all around.
As in all of Werner’s work, the world looks grim (“I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many and each evening I say: Starting tomorrow I’m going to get a grip on myself”) but never less than comic—a view captured marvelously in Michael Hofmann’s vivid translation.
About the Author
Markus Werner (1944–2016) was born in Eschlikon, Switzerland, and raised in the canton of Schaffhausen. He studied German language and literature at the University of Zurich, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the work of Max Frisch. For most of the 1970s and ’80s, he was a teacher—a profession from which he retired eagerly in 1990 to become a full-time writer. As he put it in a rare self-portrait: "I smoke, write haltingly, and live in the country." He wrote very haltingly, or rather meticulously indeed, publishing seven novels in the course of twenty years—among them Zündel’s Exit (1984), Cold Shoulder (1989), and On the Edge (2004).
Michael Hofmann is a German-born, British-educated poet, critic, and translator. His most recent books are One Lark, One Horse (poems) and Messing About in Boats (essays). For New York Review Books he has translated several works, including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, and edited an anthology of writing by Malcolm Lowry, The Voyage That Never Ends. In 2024, his translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos won the International Booker Prize.
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