LiteraturSchweiz

Reading tip

Klaus Merz, Jakob schläft: Jakob died at birth. He has been at rest in heaven since then and watches over the family. Meanwhile, down below, stories from the family album are played out. A new gadget is being worshipped in the best parlour next to the bakery – the Grundig radio. During quieter moments, the radio broadcasts news from foreign countries. That’s why Uncle Franz cannot stand it at home and prefers to ride through the village on his Harley, while during the afternoon in the rural cinema Gary Cooper stands alone against the world. With subtle irony, Merz evokes the fifties and the family’s daily routine in brief, precise descriptions. 75 pages do not make this a long book, but its brevity certainly does justice to the whimsical subtitle, “Eigentlich ein Roman” (“A Novel, Actually”). Klaus Merz, a master of short, condensed and clipped prose also adheres to his programme of linguistic concentration, while occasionally, admittedly, the anecdotal narrative helps him to achieve longer, almost epic phraseology. For this reason, this “micro-novel” diverges from the mysterious simplicity and lucidity of his other poetic work. Merz largely foregoes the subtle, irritating network of allusions, aspersions and omissions. Nor can he dispense here with a distinct lack of literary arrogance. Merz recounts scenes from his childhood during the 1950s in Wynental in Aargau. The accounts are not real, even though they seem so. Merz’s autobiographical narrative is filtered and he invents a literary ego for his book: Lukas Renz (almost an anagram of Merz). This alter ego reminds us of those episodes, which documented familiar ruptures in Merz’s earlier narratives, such as “Report”, “Im Schläfengebiet” or “Querfahrt”. Embedded in his wonderfully simple prose there are repeated flashes of enchanting sentences and finely modulated word pictures. At first, they appear “lost”, but upon closer inspection they reveal precise descriptive qualities. Having returned from the cinema on Sunday, (“High Noon”), father prepares the starter dough in the bakery and mother “brushed the ricochets out of my hair”. Such phrases observe “what is not visible through demonstration”. (Beat Mazenauer)