Ruth Schweikert Ohio Ammann Verlag & Co., Summer 2005, 226 pp. ISBN 3-250-60051-2 ‘Painfully accurate are the strokes which Ruth Schweikert uses to sketch the two protagonists so hopelessly intermingled with each other during their last night.’ Neue Zürcher Zeitung This complex novel is essentially a love story, but also a family history stretching back over three generations. Starting in the 1920s, it actually begins at the end, on 11 May 2004 to be exact, when Andreas, a young doctor, has just given his wife Marete a potent sleeping draft and is getting ready to leave their room in the Blue Waters Hotel in Durban, South Africa, to drown himself at a coastal resort nearby. He is reflecting on the past. How did it all begin, he asks himself. And he wishes that he and Merete could seal off all bad memories and start life over again, ‘more thoughtfully, with more compassion, intelligence and care’. Both Andreas and Merete come from ethnically mixed backgrounds. Andreas’s grandparents Roberto and Amalia were Italians who came to England to work in a hotel, with the intention of saving up enough money to follow Roberto’s brother to Ohio in the USA. They never get to Ohio, and for them it becomes a mythical city on which they focus their longings and dreams. Michele, their only son, marries a young German woman from Breslau/Wrozlaw. Her escape in 1945 from the bombedout Polish-German city brings her in touch with Michele. They have two children, Andreas and his Down-Syndrome sister Helen. When Andreas meets Merete she has just learned that she was discovered as a three-month old baby in a doorway in Durban. Andreas surmises that she may be half-Indian South African. They marry, she has an affair, he goes to Durban at her instigation and she follows him, worried by his doom-laden telegrams. By the end of the novel, three years after his suicide, she has had another child, found her vocation as a writer, and moved to a new apartment. This is an impressive book. Among its most fascinating sections are those touching on history – the tragic experiences of Andreas’s German mother’s family during the last months of World War II, to cite just one example – and the text is rich in literary quotations, from Dante to A.L. Kennedy. Schweikert is one of Switzerland’s most respected novelists, and this book shows her at her readable and thoughtful best.