Gertrud Leutenegger

Panischer Frühling

«When dead silence suddenly blanketed London’s airspace that April morning, I ran to Trafalgar Square. The square still lay in shadow. Only Lord Nelson, inaccessible and alone high atop his column, stood in sunlight.»

Ejafjallajökull: the name of the Icelandic volcano that erupted in 2010, had the whole of Europe literally holding its breath and presented airlines with a formidable problem. Even London was unusually quiet: no planes in the sky, just birds and clouds. In the Spring of this memorable year, a woman in the prime of her life is on her way to London: she is the ‹ I ›, the first person narrator, of Gertrud Leutenegger’s novel.
In her comings and goings along the Thames, she meets a young man from the East End. His face has been partly disfigured, burnt in a fire, and he sells a magazine for the homeless, on London Bridge. She listens to his – Jonathan’s - stories; she tells him her stories, stories of happy summer days deep in the heart of Switzerland, stories of her childhood, of her family. Again and again, sparked off by apparently chance perceptions, our narrator reaches back to the summers of her distant childhood, to a wonderful house, to a room with a tapestry on the wall, to the flag room, to encounters with animals, to transient fears and strange happenings – her memories are luminously bright.
The time comes when the volcano goes quiet again, the frantic pace of life returns, the narrator and Jonathan meet once again on London Bridge and start telling each other stories again. Jonathan also has clear and lively memories of his childhood in Cornwall, in Penzance, where he grew up with his grandmother after his father died. Telling stories binds us together: «nothing disappears for ever» is the almost casual message at the end of the novel – but therein, even in the most trivial way, lies a whole raft of storytelling.

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia:
www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: Panic Spring

Suhrkamp, Berlin 2014

ISBN: 978-3-518-42421-6