Christina Viragh

Im April

«Zwar spinne ich, aber es ist doch beruhigend, dass sich das alles nur in meinem Kopf abspielt.»

The novel «In April» by the Hungarian immigrant Christina Viragh is one of the most extraordinary novels of germanophone Swiss literature. Christina Viragh’s language captures the manifold nuances of the times and characters of 1415, the 1920s and 1960s and the era right after the turn of the century who’s stories she describes and interweaves. The common intersection of these persons is the view of the very same meadow around which they all get to live at one time or another.

The paradox constant of this novel is the ever changing meadow within a year and within many years during which people disappear. And this is another common point of their stories: the hopes and fears that link them magically and symbolically with this meadow drive their relationships apart, lead them into misery, loneliness and death. Nonetheless, Christina Viragh’s ironic and distanced writing avoids any sentimentalism. Skilfully using and revealing the possibilities of literary writing she manages to break the tragic. «In April» is a magnificent modern Comédie humaine in one volume, an epic tale of the thoroughly unheroic human.

(Samuel Moser, trans. by Anja Hälg)

Translation of title: In April

Ammann Verlag, Zürich 2006

ISBN: 978-3-250-60094-7