Zora del Buono: "For his sake"

"HOW CAN SOMEONE WHO IS MISSING STILL SHAPE A LIFE?"
"Sixty years ago today, the accident happened. Book the only room that can be found ad hoc, in a seminar house with a view over Lake Walen, in the high-altitude village that father and uncle crossed before they drove down the mountain and to their doom." Zora del Buono was eight months old when her father died in a car accident in 1963. The dead father was the family's big void. Mother and daughter hardly spoke about him. When the mother mentioned him, the daughter broke off the conversation with a pounding heart. She couldn't bear her mother's pain. Now, now sixty, she asks herself: What happened to E.T., who was only 28 years old at the time, who caused the accident? How has he lived with this guilt for the last sixty years?

"Because of Him" is the novel of a research: the narrator goes in search of E.T. in order to confront him with the story of her family. Her search leads her to abysmal areas where she finds answers that raise new questions. What does it do to her that she suddenly knows more about him, the man who killed her father, than about her father himself? And how can you be healed if a void will always remain?
The much too early accidental death of a father - and what it meant for the daughter's life.

Zora del Buono was born in Zurich in 1962. Studied architecture at the ETH Zurich and the HdK Berlin, five years as a construction manager in post-reunification Berlin. Founding member and cultural editor of the magazine "mare".