Ruth Schweikert

Wie wir älter werden

«Friederike was sitting, as she almost always did these days, with her back to the large glass doors leading out from the living room to the balcony. Her body, grown thin, was almost motionless but marvellously straight; she had stuck her legs out horizontally, nestled her feet wrapped in thick brown wool socks on a second chair, so her upper and lower body formed a right angle, like the hands on a clock, Jacques thought once again, that had stopped at a quarter past twelve.»

Ruth Schweikert’s novel «How We Grow Old» is a fine and richly orchestrated portrait of family life, which reflects the many facets of both world history and the modern age. Two Swiss families, the Brunolds and the Seitzes, are the focus of the story, bound together from the 1950s right down to the present by a secret, which only the parents know about.
Jacques Brunold and Helena Seitz were a couple for many years and almost got married. But Helena suddenly decided for Emil and Jacques eventually married Friederike. But they both continued to love each other, until it emerges that Jacques isn’t only the father of three children by Friederike, but also of Helena’s two daughters.
When the children learn the truth, many things begin to happen. With the lightest of touches, Ruth Schweikert reveals how the two families are entwined. She lets her characters look back over their past lives in a series of cross-fades and loops, viewed from different perspectives. Their life stories are shown to rest on shifting sands: as they get older, their experiences continually develop new facets and new values. Life is a tangled web, as Ruth Schweikert’s novel so beguilingly shows.

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia: www.12swissbooks.ch

Ruth Schweikert received the Solothurn Literary Award 2016.

Translation of title: How we grow old

S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 2015

ISBN: 978-3-10-002263-9