Incentives - New Literature from Austria

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Project realization: the Office of Documentation of Contemporary Austrian Literature (reviews, author’s portraits) – The Association of Translators (translations) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

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[ Knjižni namig pošilja SIKJM ] Why William Tell today, the story of the upright peasant, who became a national hero against his will? Jürg Schubiger has dusted off the Swiss national myth and shows how history can come alive in a book.
His first-person narrator spends summer holidays with his grandparents in Altdorf. Every day, his grandfather tells him a bit of the Tell-story. Skilfully and with rich detail, he describes life in the Middle Ages, the worries of the locals and governor Gessler’s lack of understanding toward the withdrawn mountain dwellers. Schubiger’s Tell is a kind-hearted but stolid man, Walter a quirky boy about to burst with pride for his father, and Gessler is a bad-tempered bloke who sees his deployment to Central Switzerland as a punishment.
Grandfather knows how to tell a tale as gripping as any football commentator and keeps involving his grandson in the course of the story, while drawing out the grand final masterly until August 1, the Swiss national holiday.
How Jürg Schubiger makes the Tell-myth his own and, in passing, manages to convey what storytelling means in the first place, shows the calibre of this author. On top of all that, the book provides a wonderful recipe for combating homesickness – the «Swiss illness.» And finally, enthralled by the story of Tell, the first-person narrator even forgets that his parents separated a short time ago and that he wishes for nothing more than the two of them to talk to each other again.
 
Jürg Schubiger was awarded the Swiss Young Media Prize 2005 for «The Story of William Tell».
 
(Christine Tresch, trans. by Simon Froehling)
Source: SIKJM Database

[ najljubši citat ] «‹Du erzählst kreuz und quer›, sagte ich.
Grossvater schaute mich an. Er überlegte. Sein Blick setzte sich an einzelnen Stellen meines Gesichtes fest. ‹Es gibt Geschichten›, sagte er, ‹die laufen kilometerlang geradeaus – wie unsere Reuss, bevor sie in den See fliesst. Wilhelm Tells Geschichte gehört zu einer anderen Sorte. Sie gleicht der Reuss, wie sie früher war: gewunden, in Flüsschen und Rinnsale verzweigt, mit Teichen und Tümpeln.›»

[ Informacije ] Schubiger, Jürg: Die Geschichte von Wilhelm Tell. (original language: Deutsch) The Story of William Tell. Nagel & Kimche, Zürich, 2003 . ISBN: 3-312-00942-1.