Description
Book SynopsisWhat does it mean to have a connection with someone? Everyday you see tens and hundreds of faces and overhear countless conversations. Everyday you pass people by - on the street. In the office. In the car. In cafes and bars. Down the corridors of department stores and hotel rooms. But what makes one person a stranger, and another a friend, an accomplice, even a lover? A traveler shuts himself up in his hotel room, with no-one but room service to talk to; a teenager stalks her long-lost father; a journalist interviews a great poet with a dark past; a woman pursues a doomed liaison with an anonymous man she meets once a month at the casino; a bar lady locked in with the regulars at night...These are just some of the tales exploring the mysterious and random side of human relationships. From the winner of the prestigious Robert Walser First Novel Award and Switzerland's Schiller Foundation Writers Prize, Goldfish Memory is the first translation of Monique Schwitter's form-breaking work. With a contemporary style that's cool, quick and funny, this collection is a refreshing new voice, not to be missed.
Trade Review"With intelligence and compassion, Schwitter portrays the sorry contradictions and sad inconsistencies of what it is to be human; the shoulds, coulds, woulds, what ifs and might have beens that litter our beautiful, flawed lives. Here is humanity stripped bare. It is in turn both discomfiting and strangely reassuring. The writing is stretched taut by the emotions and multiple layers it contains. The characters might be mad, sad, paranoid and delusional, but the clipped, incisive writing is stringently unsentimental. Eluned Gramich's wondrously imperceptible translation of Schwitter's German deserves more than a footnote or a brief aside... Not once did I feel the translation announce itself in an awkward sentence, an odd turn of phrase, a lazy word choice or even a misplaced comma. This, I think, is rare. Gramich has stepped into Schwitter's mind, just as Schwitter steps into the minds of her characters. It makes for a stylish dual debut." (New Welsh Review) "One of the most delightful [works] that our literature has brought forth in recent times." (Zurich Tages-Anzeiger) "In her prose style, Monique Schwitter succeeds in creating masterworks of the short form." (Klaus Zeyringer, Der Standard) "The fatalist power of these stories is enormous." (Michael Braun, Basler Zeitung) "This extraordinary book throws the reader against a wall." (Helmut Schodel, Suddeutsche Zeitung)
