Fog
Romansh, Chasa Editura Rumantscha, 2024
“She should say goodbye. Say goodbye to Mother and the house. She doesn’t want to say goodbye. But she has to. Mother is dead, gone. The house isn’t. It’s still here. How can she say goodbye to the house, that’s still here, if she can’t say goodbye to Mother, who’s gone?”
“In the village, people are close to one another and far apart at the same time. They stick their noses in everywhere, but never interfere. The village is an accidental community, clearly defined, where you can be seen and overlooked at the same time.”
“All around, he hears melting snow dripping from the roofs. Drops fall dully on the paving. Drops smack the ice. Drops drum the metal of the little tables. The drops stumble out a rhythm without rhythm. The pulse of a new order of time.”
In her first novel, the Swiss author Flurina Badel explores the current sociocultural changes in the Engadin, a picturesque valley in the Swiss Alps. The ‘sale’ of the valley to wealthy people, and the painful need to say goodbye to a place that you no longer call home.
After her mother’s death, Aita’s childhood home is sold to the highest bidder and becomes a holiday home. The young woman has to come to terms with her two losses – a trauma that turns her life upside down.
Even Luis, Aita’s old classmate and the local shopkeeper, has to come face to face with a solitary battle that throws him into despair. He tries to persuade the local population to stand up to the luxury property market, which is causing a shortage of affordable apartments with fatal consequences for the region.
- Title
- Fog
- Publisher
- Chasa Editura Rumantscha
- Translation rights
- Flurina Badel, mail@flurinabadel.ch
- Publication date
- October 2024
- Pages
- 216
- ISBN
- 978-3-03845-091-7
- Awards
- Bündner Literaturpreis 2025
Author
Flurina Badel
Flurina Badel (*1983 in Lavin) is a multilingual author, performer and visual artist. She was initially trained as a journalist before completing her Master of Fine Arts at the Institute Art Gender Nature of the HGK FHNW in Basel, and studying at the Institute for Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Since 2014, she has worked as a visual artist in collaboration with Jérémie Sarbach. As part of the Badel/Sarbach duo, she won the Manor Art Prize in 2019. That same year, she published her first volume of poetry «tinnitus tropic» (editionmevinapuorger, Zurich), which won the Swiss Literature Prize in 2020, and has been widely translated. Her other awards include the OpenNet Prize of the Solothurn Literature Festival (2018), and the Premi Term Bel (2022). In 2023 she was awarded a literary fellowship at the Fondation Jan Michalski. Flurina Badel often creates and performs in collaboration with both musicians and other artists, as for example with Fred Frith and Heike Liss for their Opera «Truth is A Four Letter Word» (commissioned by Sons d’hiver festival, 2023 Paris).
Photo: © Juliette Chrétien