Die Farben der Schwalbe

Marius Daniel Popescu draws a connection in this book between his childhood in Romania and his present in Switzerland, where his narrator works as a poster pasting artist and journalist. In Romania, the focus is on the funeral of the mother, which evokes memories of the country under the single-party regime. In Lausanne, the narrator's intimate, playful (and also language-playful) relationship with his daughter takes center stage. A touching tension arises between the two worlds, held together by the author's linguistic verve, who observes life, wherever it may take place, through a kind of slow motion, in which small gestures, movements, and seemingly completely banal pieces of everyday life are magnified and significantly slowed down, creating a strangely hypnotic effect on the reader.

Yla M. von Dach has translated this work.

Marius Daniel Popescu received the Swiss Literature Prize for this book in 2012 (original title: Les Couleurs de l'hirondelle, Éditions Corti). The German translation was selected for the Hotlist of independent publishers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in 2017.