Monique Schwitter Wenn's schneit beim Krokodil (When it Snows at The Crocodile) Literaturverlag Droschl, August 2005, 184 pp ISBN: 3-85420-694-1 During the past decade the short story has been making a comeback in German-language publishing houses. This is a welcome policy change, especially if the form is handled with the bravura and intelligence that Monique Schwitter displays in this collection. The author has learned from some of the luminaries of the American form of the genre - Carver or Wolfe, for instance - and perhaps also from her fellow Swiss contemporary, the masterly Robert Walser. Schwitter's language is pared down, precise, laconic, and sparkles with wit and inventiveness. Much is left unsaid in these stories, much is open-ended, dramatic gestures are lacking entirely, love is usually elusive, encounters are casual, disasters happen behind the scenes, and the uncertainty principle reigns supreme. The narrators are mostly young women of a very likable type, observant, dispassionate, self-mocking but also dreamy and full of imagination. They are willing to take risks, curious to see how things will turn out, and subject to complete changes of intent. The locations are vague, the protagonists are constantly in transit, and this indeterminacy adds to the feeling of precariousness, impermanence and openendedness. There's one exception. In Rendezvous, a magnificent story of death and grief, the protagonist finds herself alone on a parking lot in Limerick after two men who attempted to rape her have kidnapped her friend Ana and driven off with her. She is at the end of what she calls 'the lost year' after the death of her lover, during which she has been moving around Europe hardly knowing where she was. Ana protected her in sticky situations and she herself worried about what she imagined was Ana's congenital and fatal illness. Living with Ana was living with death, as she describes it. Now Ana is gone too. There are many gems in this collection - the terrifying account of addiction and despair in Morning Haze, and the surreal journey in a strange country with a strange man along a road littered with the mangled remains of wildlife in Dog Spots - to name but two. These engaging tales are marked by skill, directness, humour and verve, the fruit of a new and real talent.