This is a tricky book to pin down, and Gahse carefully avoids saying anything that might allow us to decide whether we are reading essays, short stories, prose poems, or a novel. The individual chapters take us on a somewhat idiosyncratic tour of Switzerland, including a couple of ventures across the invisible boundaries into the French, Italian and Rhaetian language areas. Some of the sections just seem to be about the narrator's reactions to what she sees, but others have hints that she is involved in a plot that is going on just out of our sight, and those hints seem to match up to clues in the "non-narrative" passages. There are things that might fit into a love-story, which might or might not be by Tolstoy, and there is the abrupt, out of context, incursion of a murder mystery, but nothing is ever resolved. And then there are the illustrations, seemingly random short excerpts from the text crossed or interleaved in the author's handwriting. All very ... unstable, as promised.

The real underlying structure seems to be an examination of how the mechanism of language — things like tenses, genders, and the rules for assembling words — constrains what we can say and what assumptions it brings along, and how those things shift as you move between languages.

Fun, in a crossword-puzzle kind of way, and probably the sort of book that you could read multiple times in a completely different way each time. ( )

The fact that so much is translated is one of the most wonderful European accomplishments, even though translation so often leads to misunderstanding.
➥Zsuzsanna Gahse was born in Budapest, went to high school in Austria, and now lives in Switzerland. This slim book of fictionalised essays, or factualised stories, swims in a plasma of different speeches, tongues, grammars; it revels in ‘the dialectal disintegration of languages’; it sees in Switzerland's mishmash of Mundarten a microcosm of Europe. ‘Nearly everything is translation, unfortunately,’ she says, worriedly: ‘the original would have been the ideal, who wouldn't rather have the original, the non-translation is what people want.’ And yet this book (like Mikhail Shishkin's Calligraphy Lesson, which would make an excellent companion piece) is one of the few books that seems to gain rhetorical power by being read in translation; its form and its method match its content perfectly.

Just to set things straight: the word migration has nothing to do with Migros, the discount superstore.
➥Migros is one of the two big supermarket chains in Switzerland. It's pronounced French-style, with a silent S. Once in Zurich I was stopped by an American woman who asked me for directions, and amazingly I happened to know where she was going to. ‘Head up the hill till you see the big Migros, then go left,’ I said, ‘and keep going until you hit the traffic-lights.’ But it was obvious that she was no longer listening; she looked extremely uncomfortable. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, red-faced, ‘but I just find that rully rully offensive.’ After some confused conversation, it turned out that when I'd said ‘Migros’, she thought I'd said ‘Negro’.

In the lake I see a man. I am against seeing this lake-man, against the gendered German nouns that cause men to appear in the sea, in the mountains, the lakebed becomes a man, every tree on the banks becomes a man, as does every fish.
➥Hungarian, Gahse's mother-tongue, is a genderless language, and she is especially sensitive to grammatical gender in German. ‘I am, at the moment, the only woman among all these non-men, and there isn't a single real person around me,’ she says, looking out at (I think) Lake Zug. ‘Or rather, there is someone else here: the night! I am not the only woman here; she is, she and her men. Die Nacht is feminine. I love her, but she is masculine to me.’ Although associating grammatical gender with human gender may seem trivial, in fact linguists have found to their surprise that such links can be quite ingrained. In one study, it turned out that French speakers were more likely to associate bridges (le pont, masculine) with qualities like sturdiness and strength, while German-speakers (die Brücke, feminine) were more likely to associate them with such qualities as curviness, elegance, and poor reverse-parking skills. I may be remembering the details wrong.

It's 3 in the afternoon and the photon war has begun, bullets fly into the lake and shoot out sideways and straight up from it while passersby rub their eyes, there are tears of light in their eyes.
➥I love this description of light on the water. Gahse's prose is almost completely free of metaphor; when she does condescend to use a rhetorical flourish, it is with deadly efficiency, as here. The number of similes in this book can probably be counted on one hand. ‘For years I have wanted to see things as they are, to stop trying to compare every single thing with something familiar,’ she says; and later: ‘The mountain range is actually the mountain range, the mountain is the mountain, the hill is the hill and nothing else, there's no need to blush, no double meaning.’ I like this suggestion that metaphors are somehow euphemistic; that they are concealing reality not out of literary exuberance but out of embarrassment.

An Englishman is sitting at the next table. His idea of the future is vaguer than anyone else's in the city. He believes that the future is dependent upon his own will.
➥English of course doesn't have a future tense. People often think that the future in English is made using ‘will’, which is somewhat true, but really most of the time we use the present tense to talk about the future. I leave in the morning. What are you having for dinner tomorrow? And so on. ‘Will’ is used to give a sort of subjunctive blurring to a sentence. ‘That'll be Abigail,’ we say when the doorbell rings. We don't mean that in the immediate future, when we answer the door, she will be there. We just mean it's probably her. Similarly, looking at our watch after a party: ‘She'll be home by now.’ Or someone complaining about the way of the world: ‘Men will insist on trying to do things themselves!’ You can see that ‘will’ produces a range of weird effects on English sentences, of which futurity is just a minor component.

Losing your face is highly characteristic of migrating. Looking in the mirror doesn't help when you're in a new place, nothing helps, no one approaches you, your own features are unfamiliar, initially to everyone else, and then gradually they become unfamiliar to you too.
➥The danger of getting lost in a new language is something Gahse and the other characters in here are acutely aware of. In this, Gahse is part of a commonality of Swiss writers who have fretted about such things – not only as immigrants but also as natives (it is, for instance, a major concern of Max Frisch's Fragebogen). ‘Think about what happens when you speak a foreign language,’ says Gahse's friend and lover Pierre during a conversation in Ouchy. ‘It's tragic! It's happening to me now, because I'm speaking French and have to hold back four-fifths of my thoughts.’ Qué verdad. Même en français where most of the time je sais bien comment m'exprimer, je ne suis pas exactement le même « moi » qu'en anglais, und auf Deutsch kann ich noch nicht even exactly what I mean erklären.

The two languages are eating each other up, they're in each other's mouths, and from Romont onward it's clear that French is doing the devouring, German has almost disappeared in the mouth of French, which makes this indisputably a love story.
➥Though Gahse spends several chapters in the mountains of Graubünden, pondering the Romansh language, her primary territory is the boundary between French and German – divided by what they call, in Switzerland, the Röstigraben or rösti-ditch. ‘Are the languages at each other's throats or in each other's arms,’ she wonders. On the shores of Lake Biel, where the towns are fully bilingual, she and Pierre hear ‘the guttural and trilled sounds continue to purr, meeting in all the different r's there are’. Deploying one of her rare and devastating similes, she goes on: ‘The guttural r and the trilled r look each other in the eye like two different species challenging one another to a fight…’ In this book, the love story and the fight are one and the same – and in translation, nothing is lost. ( )