Blutbuch

The narrative figure in "Blood Book" identifies neither as a man nor as a woman. Raised 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 can the grandmother hardly distinguish herself from her deceased sister? And what happened to the great-aunt who disappeared as a young woman? The narrative figure resists the culture of silence among mothers and seeks out the non-traditional female bloodline. This novel is a stylistically and formally unique act of liberation from the things we carry without question: 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 narrative and approaching a fluid and flowing style of writing that does not impose limits but rather opens up possibilities.