Conspicuously many books about the absent father
Published: Tuesday, Dec 17th 2024, 12:10
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With her book "Seinetwegen", the winner of the 2024 Swiss Book Prize Zora del Buono draws attention to a topic that is currently experiencing an astonishing boom in Swiss literature: the search for fathers.
Six books published in recent months deal with the search for the father. The father books of 2024 present a broad spectrum of literary forms. And they reveal commonalities. One of these is that the paternal legacy becomes an opportunity to search for the figure of the father and reinvent it in the imagination.
Historical and imaginary
In the coronavirus year 2020, the Zurich-based author Amsél was asked by the Uri State Archives whether she would like to archive her father's scientific legacy. Traugott Z. was an ETH physicist who had a reputation as a "scientist with unusual ideas", as the ETH once described him. His theory "that the primordial substance of the universe is a consciousness, i.e. something psychic", has, however, not been accepted to this day.
Amsél takes stock of documents that she often does not understand. She therefore prefers to pick up on biographical traces and allows herself to be seduced by them to talk about her father as a child and teenager. During his lifetime, she only knew him as an absent-minded physicist.
The title "The Invention of My Father" is cunningly ambiguous. While she inventories the "cosmology of interactions" that made her father known by his real name Traugott Muheim, she invents a story for him within the family circle that goes back to his great-grandparents. Even if these everyday scenes are sometimes a little too picturesque, she combines the historical with the fictional and gives her father form. It is noticeable that the narrator's mother remains completely invisible.
A hidden life
Like Amsél, Nadine Olonetzky also takes on an inheritance in "Where does the light go when the day has passed". "I owe the fact that I can tell this story to my father's perseverance," she begins her search. The estate contains extensive correspondence that her father conducted with the "State Office for Restitution" for decades. In it, he demanded compensation for his escape from Nazi Germany.
The narrator painstakingly, albeit somewhat meticulously as the story progresses, works through these documents to create a picture of her father that was previously only vaguely known to her. Because he was Jewish, he fled to Switzerland in 1943, while members of his family were murdered in the Holocaust. The narrator involuntarily becomes part of the story, but it is only after his death that her father speaks to her about it in the form of the documents he left behind.
By visiting places where her grandparents were deported and trying to imagine her father's escape, Olonetzky combines research with literary imagination and her own memories in her book. She uses real names to reinforce the biographical background, whereas Amsél hides the real names behind initials and pseudonyms.
Lyrical allusions
Florian Bissig manages without a name in "Anchises in Alaska". His "Father's Book in Verse" is an intimate dialog with a paternal you, with whom the lyrical self has an ambivalent relationship. Bissig draws on mythical figures to characterize him. The eponymous Anchises was the father of the hero Aeneas, who honored him with humility and visited him "tearfully" in the underworld after his death.
This poetic reference does not serve to exaggerate. Rather, it highlights a fatherly relationship that is neither tragic nor spectacular. "Was I a bad son to you?" the ego asks at one point. The "art of absent presence", which the father-you mastered so well during his lifetime and which disturbed the son, is played around with bitingly in the center.
Keywords such as alcohol, accident medics and later dementia frame this relationship, but basically it is about an injury that the son diagnoses in himself post mortem. Florian Bissig captures this complex emotional situation in verses that are sometimes softly drawn, sometimes sharp-edged. The lyrical speech allows him to leave gaps open to interpretation and yet make the intimacy of his address vividly palpable.
In Martin R. Dean's "Tabak und Schokolade", which was nominated for this year's Swiss Book Prize, fathers cast long shadows, even where he follows in his mother's footsteps. Or: the father figure can be so expansive that the narrator in Jeanette Hunziker's "Für immer alles" wonders whether the father's addiction is hereditary, even if he is not the biological father.
Zora del Buono, the winner of the 2024 Swiss Book Prize, lost her father when she was eight months old. 60 years later, she is trying to fill this painful void with literature.
So we can say: The mother is certain, but where are the fathers?
©Keystone/SDA
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