Apart from my website obviously, my best birthday present this year was a novel by the Swiss author Martin Suter. An old lady in a Davos bookshop recommended his books to my sister and I about four years ago, and ever since we’ve been avid fans. I enjoy reading Swiss literature in general; it’s subtly different to German literature, and Martin Suter writes in a conversational way which is easy to follow and doesn’t make you wish you were sitting next to a dictionary.

This book is quite a recent one, published in 2006. It tells the story of a young woman called Sonia who has been in an abusive marriage, and to escape both her violent husband and the person she has become, she cuts all ties with her urban life and goes to work in a health spa in a remote village in the Lower Engadine. It seems like an idyllic setting, and my sister chose the book for me because we have had so many holidays in that part of the world, but soon sinister things start happening.

The hotel in which she is working as a physiotherapist (or more precisely, a person who does massages but I’m not sure what you call it in English) has recently been reopened after a long period of closure, and there appears to be a lot of ill-feeling among the locals, some of whom had other plans for the site, about these outsiders invading their village. The hotel is soon plagued by disasters, a series of insignificant events which are nevertheless strangely threatening. First of all the plants in reception randomly lose all their leaves over night, then clocks start striking at the wrong times and the beloved budgie of the protagonist is found floating in the fish tank… One day she enters the hotel library and finds a book of fairy tales lying open at a fable called “The Devil of Milan”. It tells the story of a young girl called Ursina who sells her soul to the devil. The devil promises her great beauty and happiness, until the day when certain conditions are fulfilled and then she will have to pay the price.

He quotes the conditions thus:

“When Autumn comes in Summer, when night comes during the day, when light burns in the water, when it dawns at the twelfth stroke, when the bird becomes a fish, when the animal becomes a man, when the cross turns to the south, then you will belong to me”

Sonia realises that the mishaps in the hotel fit this rhyme and the conditions are already half fulfilled. No one will believe her, but as things become even more disturbing she thinks she has worked out the human perpetrator of the crimes … and then he dies.

What is going on in the Engadine? Is there a supernatural explanation, or is the past she has run away from coming back to haunt her?

There are twists right up to the final page, which make it a very exciting read. It’s a bizarre book, because Sonia suffers from a condition which means she can smell colours and feel smells and all sorts of other weird sensory combinations, and it took me a while to get used to sounds being described as blue. I thoroughly enjoyed it though, and for me it seemed especially realistic because it described events which actually happened; at one point the village is cut off from the outside world because torrential rain has washed away the railway bridge. I was staying about ten miles away in 2005 when that happened, so it was kind of surreal reading the book
Unfortunately I don’t think Martin Suter exists in English translation, but if you want an easy German read, I’d definitely recommend it.

Tags: Books, Engadine, German

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Books, Germany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.