Novel
Abwässer
Not translated into English
Hugo Loetscher · 1963
Synopsis
After a violent overthrow, a city's sewer inspector is commissioned to write a report: the new masters want those who look so clean to see, just once, what flows beneath their feet, and the report must also help choose his successor. The inspector begins to write. Instead of listing the required skills, he describes the character one would need to have, through digressions and memories of his own life, and his text, full of contradictions, reveals more than he would wish about himself and about the city.
Context
The first book by its author, it appeared in 1963 with an expert report, and not a novel, as its subtitle. The orientation of the regime that commissions the expertise remains vague, and the book has been read as a satire of Swiss neutrality after 1945. It established its author's breakthrough, and Emil Staiger cited it in 1966, in the Zurich literary quarrel, among what he called sewer literature. Gerda Bouvier translated it into French in 1974, and Geneviève Pasquier brought it to the stage in 1996.
Who it is for
In German, some hundred and sixty pages in paperback. The narrator is a civil servant handing in his report, and he cannot always be believed.
Prizes and reception
Charles Veillon Prize awarded to its author in 1964, the year after publication; the book of his breakthrough.
Sources for this page 4
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