Those who believe in Morand's black legend remember only his anti-Semitism, while those who are attached to his golden legend salute above all his cosmopolitanism. However, ignoring either of these two dimensions of his personality proves futile.
Every month, our literary critic puts a work through a kaleidoscope, collecting the images it projects and reconstructing their diffractions. Even if the flashes of genius turn out to be shards of glass.
Unlike Eugène Rambert or Maurice Chappaz, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz never ventured into the highlands. Faithful to an ancestral conception of the mountain as a place to be avoided, the Vaudois describes it in all its strangeness.
In the 18th century, the Alps ceased to be a mere obstacle or backdrop to become a veritable European myth. According to Professor Claude Reichler, literature provided the basis for this rediscovery, in which the mountains became a refuge from modern upheavals.
Literary dandyism, an elegant insurrection against the trivial, has found a figure in French-speaking Switzerland: Florian Eglin, a punchy aesthete.
The links between the Franco-Swiss writer and his adopted city have always been complex. A new book, however, recalls the important role played by the city of Calvin in the life of the author of «Belle du Seigneur».
Imagination is a fertile breeding ground from which the most diverse branches escape. Marie Mangez's and Benjamin Stock's novels, both of which came out at the start of the new literary season, deal with the slippage of fiction into our lives, with quite opposite follies.
With «Ce qu'il reste de tout ça», Fanny Desarzens paints a gentle, sensitive portrait of an ordinary family in the French-speaking part of Switzerland during the "Trente Glorieuses".
The couple, both anchor and vertigo, mirror of a changing society. In his new novel, Nathan Hill reveals the raw beauty and searing flaws of this timeless institution.
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