Martina Clavadetscher: «Die Schrecken der anderen»

How do you show something that everyone has long since seen? Martina Clavadetscher, Swiss Book Prize winner and one of the most renowned German-language authors, makes the invisible elephant visible in space and asks about the responsibility of literature. Skilfully told and full of impressive images, this novel already bears its frightening topicality in the title: This could be the story of any person. In any country, at any time. As long as no one learns from the horrors of others.

A boy comes across a dead man in the ice while skating and the beginning of a strange story. Kern, a wealthy heir, can no longer ignore the fact that his eyes are getting weaker. But does he even want to see clearly? There is Kern's hundred-year-old mother, who lies in bed in the attic of the villa for most of the day, and yet holds the strings in her hand with brutal consistency. There is Schibig, a lonely archivist who lets himself be carried away by Rosa, the old woman from the caravan, who has a spectacular interest in the actually unspectacular incidents – because she understands that nothing ever goes nowhere, but that everything is connected: the dead man in the ice, the cylinder lords in the Adler inn, Kern's wife, who refuses to eat chalk, a planned memorial, menacing mountain dragons and other persistent legends.

Martina Clavadetscher is a writer and playwright. After studying German literature, linguistics and philosophy, she worked for various German-language theatres and published several novels. Her works have been translated several times. She received the Swiss Book Prize in 2021 for the novel "The Invention of Disobedience". She lives in Switzerland.