Grünsee

The new edition of Christoph Geiser's debut novel Grünsee is another work of recent literary history to be added to the exquisite series of epidemic literature rediscovered in times of Covid-19.
First published in 1978, the text marks Geiser's international breakthrough as a writer and marks the beginning of his autobiographical writing project "Return to Origin", which was celebrated by readers and critics alike and has lost none of its fascination more than four decades after its publication.

Against the symbolic backdrop of the Matterhorn, the narrator, who returns to Zermatt every year to ski, skilfully interweaves the subtle reconstruction of the typhus epidemic that shook Switzerland with a three-day memory quest.The narrator, who returns to Zermatt every year to ski, skilfully interweaves the subtle reconstruction of the typhus epidemic in Zermatt in 1963, which shook Switzerland, with the simultaneous deconstruction of his seemingly 'holy' upper-middle-class family, which was hit by completely different shocks.

In this double story of decay, Geiser diagnoses with narrative aplomb the screaming speechlessness as the real family illness against the backdrop of the typhus epidemic.