Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the French (Switzerland) by Damion Searls

The protagonist and narrator here is a young woman who still lives in her deceased parents’ house in the small hometown she hates, but cannot bring herself to leave. She is not shy in criticism of others in the community yet aware of her dull existence.

A visitor turns up, encouragingly new, she takes him in, and instantly her life revolves around him. It is hard though, to tell exactly what this visitor is. A scrounger, a lover, or maybe not a person at all, a pet, or a spectre perhaps. He, for a gender is revealed, seems a set of contradictions, and provides for Koch’s wild imagination to head in compelling and quite unexpected directions.

It’s absurdist, folkloric, refreshingly abnormal and always enthralling. And it gets more so as the novel proceeds, so as the plot, such as it was, migrates to a corner of the reader’s mind.

It is Koch’s writing though, that is completely entrancing, and makes this a memorable book (along of course, with Searls’s excellent translation).

Here’s a clip..

The visitor refuses to accept that the earth turns, that the sun alternatingly rises and sets. He takes every day like the first ever, gets out of his bed, puts on a blinded face, and waddles across the balcony, squinting at the surrounding panoramic vista-he knows no name for anything, has no memory at all of yesterday when I identified each individual mountain peak for him by means of a short lecture. His morning rituals are a mystery to me. He twirls his hair with his fingers, slurps milky liquids from giant bowls, wears fake fur draped around his shoulders. The visitor is one big tackiness, an insult to the aesthetic eye. I feel sympathy for him, for he imitates a hippie or a woolly mammoth or some other extinct species, which doesn’t much help him understand the present. The minutes trickle uselessly past, down his furry arms, but he just keeps rocking in his rocking chair, his bloodshot eyes turned to look out the window.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5