Because Of Him
German, C.H.Beck, 2024
“Remembering Mum, the young widow, who wasn’t invited to dinner at the neighbour’s house because ‘it would mess up the table arrangement’.”
“Quietly wondering about intact families, secretly observing whether there is something wrong.”
“Nobody that dies in a traffic accident leaves the house that morning knowing that this will be their last day (and no one thinks that they will kill someone that day).”
Zora del Buono’s father died in a car accident when she was just a baby. An investigative novel that feels like a road trip exploring a family’s history.
In Because of him, Zora del Buono tells a story of a loss. When her father died, the narrator was just eight months old and he, at 33, was a young, aspiring doctor. The accident occurred in a right-hand bend. The driver of an oncoming Chevrolet had overtaken dangerously, killing the father. He left behind a wife. A daughter. A void. Since then, the place names near the site of the accident are like ghosts between the mother and daughter, marking something unspoken. Uznach. Näfels. Kaltbrunn.
The daughter, now 60 years old, sets out to find her father’s ‘killer’. He had to pay a fine of CHF 200, a laughable punishment. Was the judge lenient because the father was a ‘Tschingg’, as immigrants with Italian passports were disparagingly called at the time? And the perpetrator was Swiss? An investigative road trip through Eastern Switzerland begins. And with it, a journey through the history of Switzerland in post-war Europe.
The text transforms into a documentary, including, for example, fragments of memories of Berlin in the 1980s—the narrator’s freest time. There are transcripts of friendly meetings in a coffee house and flashbacks to Bari, Italy, where her father grew up. The text includes lists, photographs and other artfully interwoven testimonies, which create variety without feeling random.
The narrator’s approach to her life in the shadow of her absent father remains the driving motive. Would her life have been different if her father had survived? The book invites the reader to consider their own memoir.
With Because of him, Zora del Buono has written a masterfully composed novel. ‘A text that concerns us all’, according to the jury of the most important Swiss award for German-language literature, awarding the autofiction novel the Swiss Book Prize 2024.
Text by Daniel Faulhaber
- Title
- Seinetwegen
- Publisher
- C.H.Beck
- Translation rights
- Jennifer Royston, jennifer.royston@beck.de
- Publication date
- July 2024
- Pages
- 201
- ISBN
- 978-3-406-82240-7
- Awards
- Schweizer Buchpreis 2024
Author
Zora del Buono
Zora del Buono was born in Zurich in 1962 and lives in Berlin and Zurich. She studied architecture at ETH Zurich and spent five years working as a site manager in post-Reunification Berlin. She is a founding member and cultural editor of the magazine mare. Her books Gotthard (2015), Hinter Büschen an eine Hauswand gelehnt (2016) and Die Marschallin (2021) are also published by C.H.Beck.
Photo: © Stefan Bohrer