"Martina Clavadetscher weaves a piece of Swiss contemporary history into her elegantly constructed novel. She can certainly be seen in the tradition of Friedrich Dürrenmatt." — kurier.at, Barbara Beer
"Clavadetscher cleverly blends various literary forms, plays with sound and rhythm, and impresses with a language that is both precise and deeply poetic." — Luzia Stettler, SRF
How do you show something that everyone already sees? Martina Clavadetscher, Swiss Book Prize winner and one of the most renowned German-language authors, makes the invisible elephant in the room visible and questions the responsibility of literature. Skillfully told and full of striking imagery, this novel carries its frightening relevance in its very title: This could be the story of any person. In any country, at any time. As long as no one learns from the horrors of others.
A boy, while ice skating, comes across a dead body frozen in the ice—the beginning of a strange story. Kern, a wealthy heir, can no longer ignore that his eyesight is deteriorating. But does he even want to see clearly? There’s Kern’s hundred-year-old mother, who spends most of her day in bed in the attic of the villa, yet still pulls the strings with brutal determination. There’s Schibig, a lonely archivist who gets swept up by Rosa, the old woman living in a trailer, who takes a spectacular interest in seemingly unspectacular events—because she understands that nothing ever happens in isolation, everything is interconnected: The dead man in the ice, the top-hatted gentlemen at the Adler Inn, Kern’s wife who refuses to eat chalk, a planned memorial, menacing mountain dragons, and other persistent legends.