LiteraturSchweiz

Reading tip

Catherine Safonoff, Le Mineur et le Canari: Combining the lightness of everyday existence with the seriousness of traumatic memories and switching with a constant fluidity from one register to another, Safonoff’s novel has the elegance of a butterfly fluttering towards the depths of the human soul. An old lady suffering from depression seeks comfort from a psychoanalyst, with whom she immediately falls in impossible, enchanted love. Fantasy comes into play, but this narrative inspired by autobiographical events also casts an acutely lucid gaze on the world, its failings, its small joys and un-mendable wounds, and is ceaselessly tugged along by a self-deprecation that is at once humorous and melancholic. The tightrope walker is on the rope, moving ahead chapter by short chapter, and keeps us in suspense until the end, leaving a permanent smile on our lips: she doesn’t fall, and the reader is carried away on the narrative. (Jury selection of the Swiss Literature Prize, transl. by Andrea Mason Willfratt)