Swiss Book Prize – surprise winner Anna Stern beats her favorite culture

Surprise at the Swiss Book Prize: Anna Stern wins with her novel “Tutto qui. now. ”Favorites Charles Lewinsky and Dorothee Elmiger are left behind.

It is a good choice. Because with her fourth novel, Anna Stern has created a completely independent piece of Swiss literature: the structure is convincing, the language convincing. I have rarely seen an author who uses words so creatively to deal with the wordlessness of pain.

Anna Stern tells in «all this here. now »to a dramatic farewell: A clique of adolescents, linked since childhood, is taken by surprise by the news: Ananke is dead.

Those affected stumble. The shock of the unrecoverable is obscured by memories. Those who cry fall out of time, desperately trying to cope with everyday life in some way, while thoughts wander again and again into the past.

Poetic miniatures

Anna Stern also formalizes this state of unstable splitting: on the left, in black letters, she describes moments of the present; on the right, in gray letters, previous scenes with Ananke. So the author leaves the choice to us readers, how much we want to be attracted to pain.

These annotations are beautiful poetic miniatures; short and disturbing phrases that do without banalities and unnecessary sentimentality. Anna Stern is a scientist and researcher; With the same precision with which he probably conducts his experiments, he analyzes the troubled mental state of adolescents.

So he surprises us with a conclusion that couldn’t be bolder or more convincing; in any case we will be released in everyday life with some security.

No compromise

Many may now see Anna Stern as a compromise winner. Because for weeks we have been betting on the victory of Charles Lewinsky or Dorothee Elmiger. Both were shortlisted for the third time; and it was suggested who the jury would rather expect a third defeat.

The favorites’ current works could not be more different: Lewinsky’s medieval picaresque novel “Halbbart” celebrates the power of storytelling; Elmiger’s book “Aus der Zuckerfabrik” doesn’t just want to do this: tell a linear story.

The courage to experiment is rewarded

The fact that by now the choice has not fallen on any of these literary heavyweights, but on a writer who is only 30 years old and is currently pursuing her doctorate at ETH, can be interpreted as a positive sign: that the jury – as it claims always – it is really just about concentrating the five named books and not being guided by previous constellations, known names or even false piety.

The suspicion is that Anna Stern was the only candidate who managed to win the majority of the jury. And seen in this way, Anna Stern is not a compromise winner, but a young writer whose courage to experiment with poetics and her creative handling of a difficult subject were the most convincing.