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Literary Review
Face to Face
Points of return
GOWRI RAMNARAYAN
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Swiss writer Hugo Loetscher on what travel does to one’s vision of the world and the self.
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Travel is about understanding hierarchy differently.
Photo: S.S. Kumar
Sardonic Vision: Hugo Loetscher.
At 13 the boy thought he had to read every book ever written in order to become a writer. With just two books in his house — the telephone directory and the Bible — he haunted the library. At the university, he studied sociology, politics and economic history and began writing in newspapers and literary magazines, and, to his joy, had a documentary on dictatorship banned by the Swiss television.
The writer Durrenmatt became his friend and inspired him with his imagination. To discover the Latin American writers was to know that engagement with ideas need not spell loss of imagination, as it frequently did in his German-speaking world. For, Hugo Loetscher (born 1929) is a Swiss writing in German, with a penchant for world travel, multi-cultural encounters, philosophical reflection, and a cosmopolitan perspective. A leading expert on Latin American literature, a book publisher, and winner of prestigious literary honours like the Schiller and the Charles Veillon Prizes, Loetscher’s novels include
The Funeral Wreathe
Noah
Season and The Hump. His fables and essays have been Englished, and reveal a sardonic vision, simultaneously dispassionate and concerned about life on planet earth, especially the downtrodden and the forgotten. The style is crisp, suffused with a sharp, deadpan humour. Excerpts from an interview...
Because you write in German, are you seen as a German rather than as a Swiss writer? What is your most immediate concern as a philosopher and satirist?
My first problem is to be a writer and to be taken as a writer, my works to be discussed as literary works, not as Swiss or non-Swiss writings. I hope I can finish the book I’m writing now, My Time, My Tide. I have an age problem you know! I expect it to show the formation of a global consciousness. When I was young, even parts of Europe seemed exotic. Why, Spain was Africa to us. I learnt rather late that personal problems are important, but I can’t look at myself without at same time looking at the world. Our geography and history have changed enormously. It is important to see the world reflected in your consciousness of your own country.
Do you like being described as an urban-centric writer?
When I started writing Switzerland was perceived as Alps, cows, chocolates.
Cuckoo clocks…
Oh yes! I changed this idea. The history of Switzerland is the history of cities and they have cultural meanings. Cities have grown and spread to implant their urban character in the villages. I realised also that if you write about a city, you don’t have a motherland, or fatherland, as you do if you write about the countryside.
Switzerland has maintained its affluence, democracy and neutrality through the wars. But you paint a dystopian picture of your homeland. Your story populates it with gold-hoarding gnomes! Its elixir of eternal youth ac
tually kills an explorer, destroying our idea of the pure, rejuvenating air of the Alps.
A British writer called Swiss bankers “gnomes”. I liked it and used it. Every country has its national myths. But we must demystify myths to find the truth. After World War II we know Switzerland is not God’s own country. Our policy about the Jews was not the best. Someone in Latin America asked me, “Who discovered Switzerland?” I realised that I have to look outside even to find my own inner life. I cannot talk about myself unrelated to the rest of world.
How did you get fascinated by an outmoded genre like the fable? Your silent animals seem to represent the marginalised, oppressed, invisible communities of the world. So what does it mean to write a modern fable?
You are really asking, is it possible to write modern fables? For me it was a literary decision. Unlike classical fables my animals stay dumb and don’t have definitive characteristics. I let the situation dictate the behaviour of my animals.
You can’t get rid of the morality factor though.
I explore literary tools, learn a new scientific terminology to describe animals in the laboratory. I put the moral into history, as an indirect presence in the backdrop. For example, a sentimental attitude towards conservation makes no sense. More animal species have been destroyed by nature than by man. But now humanity has a chance to collectively save life on the planet. My third novel was an allegory about Noah’s ark. My Noah is rich, he is collecting a pool of money in an affluent society. Everybody is making money out of the deluge scare but no one wants to be Noah.
Nobody wants the deluge when they’re profiting by its threat? It’s the story of our world now.
Readers of its Russian translation said it’s a Russian situation, we have a boom on the deluge. I think I don’t write political novels, but I do have a political intention in writing.
Have your travels made you an outsider in your own culture?
Absolutely. One of my protagonists knows only his third floor flat in a Zurich apartment. He looks around, wants to embrace the world. But his arms are too short. Travel is not easy. It doesn’t make you lose your own country, but impels you to learn about it at the point of return. I also change my idea of China or India or Indonesia when I travel through them.
You mean — in a continuous process of reorientation?
Travel — whether real, imaginary, or through books — is not about losing one’s problems. They exist. It’s about understanding hierarchy differently. You are not unique. Even the unique is only a variation.
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