Willkommen im Tal der Tränen

A man leaves his village by the sea. He has found work on an alpine pasture in Switzerland. Tuinar, the others call him. The jack-of-all-trades. The others are Zoppo and the Lombard. They initiate the Tuinar into their world, into their language of work. The alpine life is only romantic for tourists. The Tuinar is proud to be one of the three true guardians of the stubborn life on the edge of the vast plain. The vast plain is their church. For one summer, they follow their cattle along invisible paths, guided by an apparently external and an inconspicuous internal logic of the earth. But the vast plain has its own laws. It is both mystery and danger. The deeper the three men venture into its silence, the more remote and impassable it becomes. Language as a means of communication threatens to be lost. "I am like you. Vast grassland. Red rivers thread through me. I am almost transparent. And delicate and tough and more delicate and tougher, much tougher, eerily tough and infinitely delicate, the years flow through me. They make me more and more what I am. Old. And yet. I begin in no place. And in no place do I ever cease to be." The book, reminiscent of a graphic novel, has been illustrated by Alexandra Kaufmann and Hanin Lerch. It was awarded the Swiss Literature Prize in 2020.