Christine Rinderknecht Ein Löffel in der Luft (A Spoonful in Mid-air) Pendo, February 2002. 156 pp. ISBN 3-8584-2451-X As this story begins, the three-year-old female narrator's seven-year-old brother is sent out to buy an item from the local shop and is killed in a road accident. The tragedy bites deep into the minds of the rest of the family and especially of the mother, who sent him out on the errand. At the end, the narrator, now a young girl, escapes from this emotional prison and the crushingly banal milieu of small-town life in 1950's Switzerland. She hitch hikes to the Mediterranean, loses her virginity to a Latin lover and so forth - all in the classic 1960's manner. Then she recovers her wits. 'I wanted to write it all down', she concludes. 'Everything that happened when one day my brother left the house to buy a tin of Ovaltine.' As an early instance of the author's skill one has only to read her treatment of the first impact of her young brother's death on his uncomprehending little sister. Left with a neighbour while her parents visit the supposedly recovering Sevi, she takes pleasure in wearing her favourite clothes and slippers, and as a treat is allowed to eat her favourite food (pasta and scrambled egg) with her brother's silver christening spoon. When her father appears to announce his death a spoonful of pasta is half-way to her mouth. Then movements and figures, a moment ago so vivid, become 'suddenly devoid of their usual colour and shape'. Again, take the description of the stricken parents returning home, moving like 'mechanical dolls' and still carrying the loaded shopping net. 'A car had run over Sevi', the narrator writes, 'and it had run over the tin as well. I wondered if Sevi looked as dented as this dented tin with its dented lid'. This is not Roddy Doyle or Frank McCourt and makes no claim to be. The milieu is perhaps closer, socially and economically, to small-town America than small-town Britain. As a study in the long-term and universal effects of a tragedy it is unmatched.