Swiss writer Ariane Koch’s strange and beguiling debut novel begins as the narrator locks eyes with an unnamed stranger on the railway platform in her small mountain hometown, “where I have come to rest, as if in a sarcophagus”.
She’s living alone in her childhood home, plotting to leave but never going further than the train station. On a whim, she invites the stranger to stay at her house, which they inhabit alongside a couch, crates of stuff and a seemingly-sentient collection of vacuum cleaner nozzles.
So begins a charming and confounding relationship as their lives intertwine, resentments flare and affections are kindled. In the opening pages of Damion Searls’ translation, Koch’s narrator looks at the visitor across the bar of her regular watering hole and observes: “Anyone as delicate as the visitor is in grave danger. How easily he might end up in the clutches of some crazy person. My great-grandfather, for instance, was a well-known cult leader. Alas I was not fortunate enough as to ever have met him.”
The tale is uncanny, bizarre and outlandish, delivered with such charm and wry humour that this brilliant slim book is utterly captivating.
- Available now from Pushkin Press.
