Blutbuch

The narrative figure in "Blood Book" identifies neither as a man nor as a woman. Growing up in a Swiss suburb, they now live in Zurich, having escaped the rigid structures of their upbringing and feeling comfortable in their non-binary body and sexuality. However, when their grandmother falls ill with dementia, the narrator begins to confront the past: Why are there only fragmented memories of their own childhood? Why does the grandmother struggle to distinguish herself from her deceased sister? And what happened to the great-aunt who disappeared as a young woman? The narrator resists the silence of their mothers and investigates the non-traditional female bloodline. This novel is a stylistically and formally unique act of liberation from the things we carry unexamined: genders, traumas, class affiliations. Kim de l'Horizon embarks on a quest for other forms of knowledge and transmission, storytelling and self-formation, undermining the linear forms of family narratives and approaching a fluid and flowing style of writing that does not define but opens up.