Reto Hänny

Flug

«So könnte es ohne weiteres gewesen sein: Vom Berg in die Stadt verschlagen und so weiter. Eindeutig die Entwicklung? Vielleicht; zu pathetisch, zu bebend, zu grell. Durchaus möglich; was soll’s. Warum also weitere Worte darüber verlieren.»

The welcoming chatter of the guests suddenly falls silent. The boy, who was just loudly pretending to be an airplane, watches as his irritated great uncle breaks his funfair propeller forever. A minor childhood trauma, which, however, results in the grown narrator, who is on an alpine flight, to set off unstoppably down memory lane. In his second novel, Reto Hänny elaborately strings various fragments together: from a childhood in the mountains, school years in Ruch (an anagram of Chur, the capital of the Swiss Canton of Grisons, which was eponymous for Hänny’s debut novel «Ruch»), right up to the youth unrests of the 1980s and the subsequent police repression. «It could have easily been like that: driven from the mountains to the city and so forth.»
Thus the author continues dreaming about flying with both open and sceptical eyes – while also recounting the history of aviation and its progress by the example of the French aviation pioneer Blériot. But we are not faced with the inflated hero of a record flight across the English Channel of 1909. Because flight also always the crash landing. And so fantasy lets smashes the author in his alpine aircraft to pieces in the fog. Hänny ends his «Flight» novel with a single, nebulous and equivocal word: ‹submerged›.

(Severin Perrig, trans. by Simon Froehling)

Translation of title: Flight

Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1985

ISBN: 3-518-03563-0