In his only novel, published posthumously in 1976, Fritz Zorn stabs at the Swiss bourgeois society that killed him. A work about two converging cancers: his own and conformism. This important book received a new French translation this year.
Born into a middle-class family on the golden shore of Lake Zurich. To have been educated «the right way» and to have led a life «the right way» in the 70s. Dying of cancer at the age of 32 without having lived. And, above all, become aware of it. All too late. Fritz Zorn has a lot to be angry about. As he recounts in March.
Although this book, now translated into French for the second time, caused quite a stir when it was published fifty years ago, its echoes still resonate in contemporary Switzerland. For this is no ordinary autobiography. Rather, it's an autopsy. That of himself: Fritz Zorn, or rather Fritz «Angst» as he calls himself, a young man seeking to understand the roots of evil. From sound evil. For his illness is twofold. On the one hand, there's the parasite of bourgeois conformism that's eating away at him. Then there's the cancer that's killing him. The two intermingle in a «psychosomatism» that any doctor would find dubious, but which, in literature, is highly symbolic. According to the narrator, it's his upbringing, social norms and his way of dealing with them that have hollowed out his body.
«(...) I thought of the tumor as containing “swallowed tears”. It was as if all the tears I hadn't been able - and hadn't wanted - to shed in my life had gathered in my neck to form this tumor, having failed to fulfill their true function, which was to flow (...).»
In this book, published posthumously, the Zurich-born man uses numerous examples to lash out at a transgenerational legacy that has confined him to a narrow, muzzled, uptight, livid, Protestant, sad, frigid world shaped by restraint. An affluent environment where anything that could lead to an argument is systematically defused with a «it's complicated». Where no one dares say «no» for fear of breaking the harmony. Where there is such a thing as «good literature» or «good music», regardless of the tastes and preferences of those who read and listen to it. Codes so predefined that it becomes impossible to form opinions or enemies. Not even friends. Let alone lovers.
A generational testament
It's in this mole-like atmosphere that the narrator lives his life. Going through depressive episodes of varying severity. So, before he dies, he seems to want to settle the score. His parents are portrayed as (almost) perfect representatives of the hated model. The criticism is heavy-handed. But it's also subtle. For Fritz Zorn, his parents are victims rather than executioners. Just like him, in the end, who has not succeeded in making his own decisions.
«(...) For me, the war is lost. But against whom exactly would I have waged this war? Who were my enemies? It's hard for me to answer, though the words run through my mind: my parents, my family, the environment in which I grew up, bourgeois society, Switzerland, the system.»
But even more than a programmed killing, Mars is a testament to the generation born in the 50s. These Swiss-German sixty-eighters who wanted to kill the father and for whom coming was already a revolution. Men and women who today - if they haven't been swept away by evil - are retired. Fritz Zorn offers us a window onto their world, through writing that was dramatically committed to paper before his death, and which has now been translated as closely as possible to his violent and singular language.
Write to the author: diana-alice.ramsauer@leregardlibre.com
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Fritz Zorn
March
New translation by Olivier Le Lay
Gallimard
2023
320 pages
French 
German 
English