Swiss master of madness

First, I’d like to put a curse on most editors of ‘Selected Writings’ who, sometimes under the devious word ‘Collected’, serve us cold cuts instead of the whole hog; second, I’d like to congratulate the University of ChicagoPress for allowing us once again to read Friedrich Dürrenmatt in English, thereby restoring to the English-speaking public one of the most important writers of the 20th century. There are certainly authors who deserve or demand a selection, since, like the curate’s egg, they’re excellent only in parts; others, however, should be available in their entirety because each of their writings builds on the rest and no single one affords a full enough picture. But we must count our blessings and, in these days when editorial policies are strictly guided by marketing departments, we must say a daily prayer for the survival of the university presses which have become the last preserve of even moderately intelligent literature.

So here we have, divided into three volumes, a selection of Dürrenmatt’s plays, fiction and essays, fluidly translated by Joel Agee, though a little too schoolbookishly footnoted for my taste. (Do we really not know that a Romeo y Julieta is a cigar, that Föhn is a hot Alpine wind, that the labours of Hercules were 12 and that Christian Dior is a ‘prominent French fashion designer’? Have we really forgotten that Solzhenitsyn is a ‘Russian novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970’, and that Billy Graham is a ‘popular American evangelist’?) Thankfully, most of Dürrenmatt’s best writing has been included, and almost any of these pieces is an astonishing example of a writer’s power to portray and explain experience, and then subvert the whole procedure by opening up his arguments to unanswerable questions. Reading Dürrenmatt’s work leaves us with the impression of having witnessed the creation and then the explosion of a small galaxy.