Peter Bichsel

Sitzt du bequem? Then I'll begin…. The stories in this charming collection are written in the style of children's fables – which is fortunate for me, since my reading level in German is approximately that of a slow ten-year-old. (I was alarmed here to encounter the word Kranschiffwagenzieherkleiderwagenzieher, meaning ‘the person who pulls the wagon which is carrying the clothes of the person pulling the wagon that holds the boat that carries the crane’.) At any rate, the content is for all ages, and Swiss author Peter Bichsel uses the register very cleverly as a way of asking deceptively complex questions.

The characters in these tales are all fretting about knowledge – what they know, and how they know what they know. In one, a man sets off to walk around the world, just to prove that he will in fact end up back where he started; in another, a boy named Columbus invents a country called ‘America’, and is baffled when explorers promptly go out and find it – he can never be sure, afterwards, if the people who say they've been there are making it up or not.

Throughout, there is a Wittgensteinian sense of how shaky language is as a basis for knowing things. A character in one story gradually replaces every word in his vocabulary with his mysterious uncle's name, ‘Jodok’. Elsewhere, a man starts to swap words around: he calls a bed a picture, a man a foot, freezing he calls looking, standing he calls browsing, and so on, so that a description of his morning routine begins:

Am Mann blieb der alte Fuß lange im Bild läuten, um neun stellte das Fotoalbum, der Fuß fror auf und blätterte sich auf den Schrank, damit er nicht an die Morgen schaute.

[In the man, the old foot rang in picture for a long time; at nine o'clock the photograph album put, and the foot froze up and browsed on the fridge so his mornings wouldn't look.]

This is somewhat reminiscent of the obscure Tom Stoppard play Dogg's Hamlet, which was also based on a thought experiment in Wittgenstein. But you don't need any philosophical background to enjoy these bite-sized little brain-scramblers – they're good clean epistomological fun for kids of all ages.… (meer)

Über das Wetter reden, also über irgendetwas. Verstanden werden, und sei es von einem, der gar nicht meine Sprache spricht. Peter Bichsels Kolumnen kommen mit jedem ins Gespräch, denn seine hohe Kunst des Erzählens beschäftigt sich mit allem Möglichen: Jahreszeit und Wetter, Sport- und politischen Ereignissen – immer aber mit Menschen, mit Geschichten von Fremden und Freunden. Der Erzähler meint und meldet Zweifel an, auch an der eigenen Meinung. Er zielt auf eine Aussage, indem er abkommt vom Weg, hinübergleitet zu einem anderen Gegenstand, abbricht, um in einer Schlussvolte doch wieder anzuknüpfen. Dauernd sind sie in Bewegung, seine Kolumnen, das hält uns wach; wir reagieren angeregt; wir fühlen uns gut unterhalten.… (meer)