One Another: A Novel

by Monique Schwitter, Tess Lewis (Translator)

Overview

One Another dazzles as Monique Schwitter deftly weaves an intricate, moving, and wonderfully eccentric portrayal of love and art—erotic, chaotic, comedic, tragic, and glorious.

When a writer googles the name of her first love and discovers he committed suicide years ago, she is deeply shaken. Memories of Petrus begin to flood into her mind, followed by the memories of other loves, one after another. What exactly is love?  How does it come and go?  She begins to search her personal history for answers. Twelve men. Twelve chapters in a novel.  Melancholy Petrus, handsome actor Jakob, Simon with his pet rat, gay Nathanael, a student, her brother. Her husband’s story is supposed to be the last.  But as story after story unfolds, the past and present entangle until her orderly search is interrupted by present-day complications of love and by a startling event overlooked at home that begins to seize the plotline of both her art and life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892554973
Publisher:	Persea
Publication date:	02/12/2019
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Monique Schwitter was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and now lives in Hamburg, Germany.  She is the author of two volumes of short stories If It Snows, Let’s Meet at the Crocodile (2006), for which she was awarded the Robert Walser Prize, and Goldfish Memory (2011), as well as a novel Ohren haben keine Lider and the play Himmels-W (both in 2008).

Editorial Reviews

"Are we the sum of our beloveds—how we choose them, how we leave them, how we are abandoned?  One Another is a young wife’s clear-eyed, witty look back on her twelve great loves: an album of memory and desire, of husbands, dogs, meals, debts, cemeteries, penguins, lovers and sons. Written with fervent honesty. Lit deeply from within."

Dylan Landis

"One Another is a beautiful, charming, funny and philosophical book about the mad gamble of love. Schwitter is a miraculously gifted writer, and it’s pure pleasure to ricochet around her roomy, vibrant universe. There are no cold cases here—in these twelve chapters, old flames burn bright again, rekindled by the narrator’s powerful imagination. She fuses these shards of broken relationships into a mirror, revealing her own face to us in the process—a true delight."

Karen Russell

2018-11-12

In prizewinning Swiss writer Schwitter's (Goldfish Memory, 2015, etc.) new novel, a novelist is writing a book about her past loves.

Fueled by nostalgia and intimations of mortality, a married writer with two young children googles her first love and discovers that he committed suicide. So begins a discursive "chronology of men." "How many loves does anyone have?" she muses. "The way I count depends on what I tell." Though chiefly romantic, the 12-man lineup that follows also includes loves platonic, familial, and imaginary. There is a 12-year relationship with a handsome actor, sex with a stranger in a public urinal in Berlin, an affair with a lecherous mentor, a flirtation with a writing student. Although the book is structured around the men in her life, the narrator's most vivid connections seem to be the ones with her dog and her deceased grandmother, who used to tell her, among other things, "Love is not something you choose, dear heart." The present intrudes into the narrative in the form of an unexpected calamity brought about by her husband. "It's your own fault if you think you can tame, order, channel life by writing," the narrator chides herself. On impulse, she leaves children and husband and takes the dog to Zurich, where she grew up, by train. "I'd like to have my own apartment," she thinks. "My own mailbox. No one else's mail, no one else's problems." In a surprise twist, the final chapter introduces a character who predates the others. "I tried to tell the story without you but it won't work." Although he casts a long shadow for her, the lateness of his entrance mutes a loss that would otherwise register more deeply.

A romantic bildungsroman, uneven in places but refreshingly unsentimental, narrated by a woman in the middle of a marital crisis.

Kirkus Reviews