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Adolf Muschg
Sutters Glück
(Sutter's Luck)
Suhrkamp Verlag, February 2001, 340 pp. 'We see ourselves naked in the mirror and note what we find', wrote Adolf Muschg in an essay on literature as therapy. There is ample evidence that the experiences of Emil Gygax (known as Sutter to his wife) are to be understood as therapy in this sense. The novel begins with Ruth, Sutter's wife, committing suicide by drowning after a long battle with cancer. Five weeks later he begins to be plagued by telephone calls, at precisely the same time each night. He generally allows the phone to ring, and after the second ring it ceases. One night it rings three times. The next day he is shot and wounded. The criminal investigation which follows, and his own quest to discover the criminal, involve him in a critical re-examination of his dealings with many colleagues and acquaintances. As a legal reporter for a newspaper he has been inclined to take sides in the cases about which he writes. One case in particular seems to offer a clue. Again, could the fact that on one occasion he was unfaithful to Ruth with the wife of her former lover, a famous painter who himself has had an affair with a murderess, provide the key? Motives abound, but the trail reaches its end when Sutter, after a complex process of mourning, sets off to fulfil his wife's last wish by scattering her ashes in the lake in which she drowned. Having done so, he too drowns himself.
A particularly striking feature of this work is its employment of the Romantic fairy tale. Muschg is a scholar of German literature and uses this device both to epitomise Ruth's neo-Romantic values and to offer an aesthetic alternative to the materialism that marks Swiss society today. While not a prerequisite for enjoying the novel, those readers familiar with Grimm and with the poetry of Hoffmannsthal and Stefan George, and prepared to embark on some literary detection to parallel the legal detection which the characters pursue, will be rewarded with amusing and illuminating insights.
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