Klaus Merz

This slim volume consists of two halves. The first sketches fifty years of the history of a firm. The brief vignettes portray some memorable figures against the background of events from the Prague spring through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the World Trade Center.
The second half is a collection of poems entitled “Über den Zaun hinaus.” Recurrent themes are aging, observations of village life, love, Christianity, and the challenge of writing. Both parts of the book share a wry, aphoristic manner of expression. I enjoyed it.… (plus d'informations)

This collection of three novellas is a welcome compendium, for English readers, of the work of one of Switzerland's major writers. Klaus Merz (b. 1945) grew up in the canton of Aargau, where he still lives; his work, which has picked up a lot of major prizes (including Switzerland's oldest and most prestigious literary award, the Gottfried Keller Prize), is still mostly untranslated. And it's great: luminous and wise, and concise almost to the point of ecstasy.

The concision can be eyeballed – this slim book of 183 pages packs in three separate published works, namely Jakob schläft (1997), LOS (2005) and Der Argentinier (2009). Each tiny phrase within them positively thrums with constrained power, the words compressed so tightly that they act like springs, bursting with with potential energy, ready to jack-in-the-box into your brain if you brush against them too hard.

This is clearest in the first and most conspicuously brilliant story, Jacob Asleep, which is made up of a series of bizarre, striking flashes of imagery. ‘A headless laughing kookaburra flew over the garden fence onto the train tracks, where the linesman later found it lying between the rusty ties.’ Instead of working forwards, towards these snapshots, so that we understand their context, he works backwards from them, giving his scenes the inexplicability of surrealist iconography.

The surface of the water had looked like the sequinned costume of a white clown when Grandfather's carp shed their scales and floated naked, belly-up, across the concrete-lined basin toward the drain.

The same motifs recur again and again in the three stories: teachers, grandfathers, men with missing fingers, and – especially – boys who die young (brothers, sons). The tone is bittersweet, but in no way depressing or maudlin – rather, Merz writes as though tearful with some species of mystical revelation. (In that respect he reminded me a little of the early twentieth-century Swiss writer Regina Ullmann.)

Tess Lewis's translation is, I think, superb as English prose, with no hint of translationese and not a moment of uncertainty in tone or register. Altogether it makes for a very beautiful book, with plenty of gentle lessons which seem the more touching for having been drawn out of such pared-down, emblematic stories.

And it's up to us, for better or worse, to fashion a human life amid the fauna. Recycling, hunger, love and raising bees must be understood as our homework, every bit as much as laughing, arguing, suffering and studying. Or reading and dancing. And dying.… (plus d'informations)

Ein Bruder mit Wasserkopf, eine Mutter mit Depressionen und ein Vater mit Epilepsie - das ist das Umfeld, in dem sich Lukas Renz als Jugendlicher im kleinen schweizer Dorf zurechtfinden muss. Und da ist natürlich noch Jakob, der zweite Bruder, der ungetauft stirbt und seitdem im Stillen über die Familie wacht. Klaus Merz "Roman" misst nicht einmal 100 Seiten und besticht denoch durch seine Fülle. Diese wird erzeugt durch ungemein dichte Sätze, kurz und prägnant und gelichzeitig voller Aussagekraft. Klaus Merz hat in dem Buch seine eigene Jugend aufgearbeitet, vieles ist autobiografisch und dann wieder auch nicht. Man sollte dieses Buch gelesen haben, wobei sich allerdings empfiehlt, sich zuvor mit der Lebensgesichte des Autors vertraut zu machen.… (plus d'informations)