A lonely house in the mountains and a natural disaster that causes a Swiss canton to suddenly renounce the present: Sinking Stars is a soaringly inscrutable novel in which an apparent idyll becomes a threat and which takes us deep into the world of literature itself.
Thomas Hettche writes about traveling to Switzerland in the wake of his parents’ death to sell his childhood vacation home. Yet what begins realistically soon turns into a dystopian fairy tale in which nothing is what it seems. A landslide has turned the Rhone Valley into a huge lake leading to a poitical regression into archaic conditions.
Hettche brilliantly depicts alpine nature and its inhabitants’ forgotten ways, combining ancient myths and sagas with an often downright Kafkaesque scenario. All of this assumes new meaning in our present roiled by identity issues and environmental destruction. At its core, however, this great storyteller’s musical prose revolves around the questions of what comfort storytelling can provide and what we should defend in the turmoil of our times.
