Simona Ryser

Maries Gespenster

«Es gab keine Gespenster. Das war ihr klar, und sie wollte auch keine Gespenstergeschichten schreiben, sondern was für die Gesellschaft, auf keinen Fall aber Märchen, und sie wollte keine Gespräche führen mit Halbtoten. Punkt.»

«Maries Gespenster» is the remarkable debut novel of Zurich based author Simona Ryser. Marie erratically and restlessly roams the labyrinth of a metropolis. Again and again she meets her long gone and buried mother on the street or in a bus. Marie struggles with the memories about her. Rituals protect her from going crazy. Every day she modifies lists to keep up an alleged order and to handle this complicated life.

With a heavily rhythmised language Simona Ryser tells the story of Marie and her attempts to tame the everyday, a language that bears the roughness and unruliness of Büchner’s drama «Woyzeck». Discreetly and ingeniously she inserts motives and phrases from it into her text, accompanying it with the echo of «Lasciate mi morire» from Monteverdi’s opera «L’Arianna». She thereby creates a compact narrative staccato in which she embeds the heroine who wanders like a ghost through temples to consumerism and the urban wilderness in search of her friend Wolf and of herself. At the end she deals «the numbers anew».

(Beat Mazenauer, trans. by Anja Hälg)

Translation of title: Marie’s Ghosts

Limmat Verlag, Zürich 2009

ISBN: 978-3-85791-535-2