Odilo Abgottspon
Switzerland
A story about being a stranger in a Valais mountain village? In Leukerbad, we heard that before. Yet this story is set on the other side of the Rhone Valley, in the wine-growing village of Vispertimen – “Tärbinu”, as the Valaisans say.
As in nearby Ticino, many here were forced to emigrate at the start of the 20th century – the soil was too barren, especially in dry years. Odilo Abgottspon’s grandfather Gustav is drawn to Silesia as a milkman. A few years later, he returns to his home village with his wife and children – but for decades the family will never truly belong; because of his wife’s family background, they are known only as “die Titscha”: the Germans. The life story of this woman, Abgott-spons’s grandmother Elisabeth, forms the gravitational centre of this multi-generational novel, which depicts exclusion, hardship, deprivation and fear, but also solidarity and the small joys of everyday life. At the same time, a portrait emerges of a village undergoing slow but steady and lasting change.
Odilo Abgottspon, born in 1956 in Visperterminen, studied German and art history and taught German at secondary schools in Rome and Lucerne. He now lives in Bern and the Valais;
31st Leukerbad International Literary Festival:
