Ursula Fricker Fliehende Wasser (Melting Snow) Pendo Verlag, February 2004. 176 pp. ISBN 3-8584-2575-3 Under a layer of melting snow lies a corpse. Its lips are blue and contorted into a failed smile; in a wallet inside its jacket is a photograph of an unknown man. From that striking point this haunting and accomplished first novel moves backwards in time, revealing, layer by layer, the course of a failed, frustrated life. Deftly the narrative fragments are linked together to present the portrait of a man who never took chances. His name was Simon Brock. The photograph was of someone his family never knew – the fiancé of one of his friends. Simon had loved him passionately but had ‘done the right thing’, and thus set in train the pattern of his future life – an endless cycle of repression and self-contradiction. The setting is Switzerland in the 1940s and 1950s with its cloying parochialism and imperative need to conform, and amid the frustrations there is much dark humour: Simon checking his sleeping children’s breath for evidence of illicit sweets, berating his wife for forgetting the turnips to chew on during a hike, or doing his job, which consists of nothing more than moulding the silverwork on two identical teapots every week. The novel is full of other, equally frustrated, characters: the two maiden aunts, Thesi and Emma, forbidden the happiness which had been denied to their mother; Simon’s wife Elizabeth, who had fled the claustrophobia of her native Emmental into a joyless marriage; and daughter Ida, the main character apart from Simon, who, at the end of the book, sits waiting for news of her father’s death – a death which will remove the tyrannical repression from his children’s lives and break the cycle at last. Written in richly textured language, this finely crafted novel combines the specific detail of the Swiss setting with social and family conflicts that are timeless and familiar. The delicately layered snapshots of family life, the frustrated and frustrating characters, the black humour and the tragedy of unfulfilled lives make this a remarkable debut indeed.