Written against the fear of

cancer is not equal to valid book cloth. Probably everyone knows someone well who is ill or has died or has at least even afraid of it. With a certain Shyness therefore, it is a cancer book – you're reading in a fear space.

As a critic, one is inhibited in multiple ways: More than any other autobiographical material of the cancer separates the author – here the author from the reader: This, the disease (which is often enough, to death), that has not. For these decays, the life in two parts, before and after the diagnosis; is the book she writes about it, one like no other. For those in a long series of readings, which require an assessment. But how can you judge such a personal book, without, the, the battle processed, it to Survive, to be close to you? Of course: according to the design of the substance, or, to quote the author, according to the form, the "the substance has assumed in its own way".

view the future

The everyday life of the Swiss writer Ruth is Schweikert in addition to the Letter of a strong culture of political engagement taken, as well as teaching in the recent literature, lab. On 9. February 2016, she gets the breast cancer diagnosis. She has the most aggressive variant, "triple negative", a week later, she is in surgery. It is chemotherapy and radiation treatments close to, stays in a homeopathic and an Ayurvedic hospital.

the days of The week between diagnosis and Operation the structure of the book (no generic name). In these chapters, the author engages, but also far – in the past, from Childhood through the study to the death of the father; advance in the Phase of therapies, convalescence, and far, far in the future, in a Museum of 22. Century, in other words, not only missing objects are presented (including "incurable tumors"), but also a showcase for the author, who survived their cancer, two glacier tours, and a four-thousander climbing; "you apparently wrote a few more books, then lost track of her", it's there.

to be reported Only in this indirect way, in the distance the third Person, dare to Ruth Schweikert so, the "happy end", Survival,. A bit of superstition may play in cancer you never know. Interspersed in the disease report are encounters with people who have experienced something Similar, a whole landscape of Infested and Dead opened, Is surrounded by the author of the cancer or it is the selective perception that pregnant women are particularly many strollers leads to slide inside?

As a further Element of the SMS. Such, writes the author, and what is more, you will receive: Attempts of sympathy, of consolation, of encouragement – well-intentioned, but all characters for the insuperable gap that separates the writer from the recipient: in the "cancer jail", the other in freedom. Finally, Schweikert between narrative changes and reflective passages.

The dig

The "form" that the substance "has adopted in its own way", bridge is, therefore, highly heterogeneous. It is also something fragmentary wanted a "Not-ready-to-be-Can" with all the Experienced, which is expressed in the individual paragraphs, the end without the point (and, often, without the "ordinary" sentence final).

The cancer also opens the Person to self-dig a trench, between the body suddenly, a foreign body, and the I, which is attacked by this foreign body, and perhaps destroyed. Bridge can Ruth Schweikert this ditch as a writer. Immediately after the diagnosis, you know that you will write. The cancer is to the substance, the problems and risks suffered by the I to the Material. The almost emphatic charged Status of the writer balances the verse from honored physicality.

literature , she writes, is needed: first and foremost, of your self, as a means of Survival, the meaning of life, identity; but also of others. For Schweikert calls shortly before the end of the book, the German colleague Katharina Hacker as a witness, the the author writes: "Against the fear and despondency, and, above all, tired of dullness ... it needs one or the other next Büchel pieces of you."

relief finally

The language of the book is brittle; a literary gloss surface is also Schweikert, the last concern of Ruth. Some of the wording of scars hard on the banality ("If we tell, we describe the world as it is, but how it occurs to us"), some of the other acts tried and claims on the take ("The reddish-beige is reminiscent of that of the fifth Version of Böcklin's Isle of the dead"). And the gender of bureaucracy in your office at work.

"like dogs" does not reach the reflective depth and brilliance of Susan Sontag's "illness as metaphor", not even the literary consequence of David Wagner's "life". But you don't lay the book out of the Hand, without scaring, to be relieved touching: The author lives, and the reader also.

Ruth Schweikert: days, such as dogs, S. Fischer, Frankfurt, 2019. 200 p., CA. 32 Fr. Reading: 15. April, The Literaturhaus Zurich.

(editing Tamedia)

Created: 20.03.2019, 18:06 PM