Swiss Literature Series – serie

The narrator of Volatile Texts: Us Two falls in love with Pierre, the book’s secret protagonist. During their trysts she rediscovers Switzerland, a place where every valley has its own language and every person is translated. It’s a perfect microcosm of Europe-a collection of accents, languages, and landscapes. Volatile Texts is Zsuzsanna Gahse’s ironic and prescient meditation on a Europe that is disintegrating in the same way that the Alps disintegrate into individual lakes and valleys. Yet language itself is the true subject of these prose miniatures, which are volatile and unstable because they expose language as an arbitrary construct made of interchangeable parts; however, this is also what makes the book such an exciting read.

Tynset takes place during a sleepless night, but as the work unfolds it becomes apparent that the circumstances of the immediate present serve merely as points of departure. Plagued by incessant rumination, the narrator’s restless mind spins thread after thread of thought, fantasy, and memory into an elaborate tapestry spanning centuries and covering thousands of miles-all without the narrator ever leaving his house. Hildesheimer famously refused to describe Tynset as a novel; instead, he chose to think of the work as an extended monologue whose structure derives from the musical rondo form, with the recurrence of the titular Norwegian town functioning as a refrain.