All guests of the European Literature Days from 2009 to 2014.

[ book tip by Literatur Schweiz ] A Swiss development aide worker witnesses the genocide in Rwanda. One David Hohl – the surname translates into «hollow» – arrives in Kigali as a 24-year-old idealist, but the Rwandan capital turns out to be a boring village, in which righteous helpers and sinister cynics meet. The Rwandans themselves are peaceful and industrious workers, yet the country has a dark side to it, which Westerners cannot grasp. When Tutsi rebels attack, the catastrophe unfolds; the killing begins.

Waiting in vain for his lover, David Hohl survives in an abandoned house for a hundred days. From this point of view he realizes that the seeming chaos springs from a perfect order, «in which everyone knows his or her place.» The worst, he begins to sense, is the notion that there is a symbiosis «between our virtues and their crimes.»  Without the intention to do so, he is however in danger of turning into a self-righteous cynic himself, as cynicism is merely the flipside of helpfulness. Herein lies the core statement of the book, which combines maximum concentration with elegance and political passion.
Bärfuss succeeds in generating a sense of oppressive uncertainty while never coming across as know-it-all. «One Hundred Days» is a great book that treats its harrowing subject matter with the highest poetic economy in less than 200 pages.

(Beat Mazenauer, trans. by Simon Froehling)

[ Favourite quote ] «I know that perfect order rules in a perfect Hell, and sometimes when I look at our country, the balance, the propriety with which everything is done, I remember that they called that country from Hell the Switzerland of Africa, not just because of the mountains and the cows, but also because of the discipline that rules every aspect of daily life. I know now that genocide is only possible in an organised state; in which everyone knows his place and not even an insignificant bush grows on a random spot and not a single tree is cut down arbitrarily, only because an order to clear the ground was issued, because a decision was entered on a particular form and ratified by the appropriate authority.»

[ book info ] Bärfuss, Lukas: One Hundred Days. . (original language: English) Hundert Tage. Granta Publications, London, 2012 . ISBN: 978-1-84708-480-4.
Translated from German by Tess Lewis