Swiss Book Award: surprise winner Anna Stern outperforms favorite culture

Surprise at the Swiss Book Prize: Anna Stern wins with her novel “Everything here. 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 compelling, the language compelling. Rarely have I seen an author use words so creatively to deal with the wordlessness of pain.

Anna Stern tells in «all this here. now »to a dramatic farewell: a gang of teenagers, connected since childhood, is surprised by the news: Ananke has died.

Those affected stumble. The impact of the unrecoverable is overshadowed by memories. Anyone who suffers falls out of time, desperately trying to cope with everyday life in some way, while thoughts wander back and forth in the past.

Poetic miniatures

Anna Stern also formally implements this unstable state of division: on the left, in black letters, she describes moments in 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 drawn to pain.

These annotations are beautiful poetic miniatures; short and disturbing phrases that dispense with clichés and unnecessary sentimentality. Anna Stern is a scientist and researcher; With the same precision with which he probably carries out his experiments, he analyzes the troubled mental state of adolescents.

So he surprises us with a conclusion that couldn’t be bolder or more compelling; in any case, we will return to everyday life with a certain degree of confidence.

Without obligation

Many may now see Anna Stern as a compromise winner. Because bets have been made for weeks on whether Charles Lewinsky or Dorothee Elmiger would win the race. They were both on the short list for the third time; and it was suggested who the jury would prefer to wait for a third defeat.

Today’s favorites couldn’t be more different: Lewinsky’s medieval picaresque novel “Halbbart” celebrates the power of storytelling; Elmiger’s book “Aus der Zuckerfabrik” does not want to do just that: tell a linear story.

The courage to experiment is rewarded

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

The suspicion is that Anna Stern was the only nominee who could win the majority of the jury. Viewed this way, Anna Stern is not a compromise winner, but a young writer, whose courage for poetic experimentation and her creative handling of a difficult subject were most compelling.