The Gilded Chalet: Off-Piste in Literary Switzerland

About this book

With a sharp eye for detail and a historians capacious knowledge Padraig Rooney has written a superbly amusing guide to all the writers whove been drawn to or emerged from Switzerland. This is a book that should be stuffed into every stocking - the perfect Christmas gift! -Edmund White author of The Flneur Rainy summer of 1816. Paparazzi train their telescopes across Lake Geneva on the hanky-panky of Byron Shelley and their womenfolk. Mary Shelley is inspired to write Frankenstein. Byron diets and dashes off The Prisoner of Chillon while his doctor Pollydolly gives birth to The Vampyre. Percy Shelley almost drowns in the lake. Together they put Switzerland on the literary map. From Caesar Rousseau and the Romantics from Conan Doyle to le Carr Hesse and Highsmith writers have scratched their names on the Swiss chalet. In the nineteenth century they came for fresh air fresh milk and the sublime scenery escaping tuberculosis and smog. Switzerland became spa central a place of health fads luxury hotels and nude sunbathing. Sherlock Holmes fell to his death only to be resurrected. H. G. Wells thought hed died and gone to heaven. Hermann Hesse had himself buried to the neck as a cure for alcoholism. Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain and lusted after the sailor suits. Neutral Switzerland became a haven in the twentieth century for Borges Joyce Remarque Hemingway Fitzgerald Nabokov and Highsmith. They wrote their classic works up some secluded valley in a coldwater flat in Zrich or in a five-star hotel. The Gilded Chalet took them in and gave them a suite with a view. Anarchists spies and detectives came too. Sherlock Holmes Maughams Ashenden Flemings Bond le Carrs spooks and double agents. Glauser and Drrenmatt invented Swiss noir - not a chocolate but a style. Behind the squeaky-clean facade Swiss and foreign writers often found something rotten in the state. Laundered art and money the worlds slush funds daylight robbery. Switzerlands travel writers Maillart Eberhardt Schwarzenbach and Bouvier couldnt wait to make their escape to a bigger air and a warmer climate. The Gilded Chalet is crammed with old lederhosen and new butterflies spas and spies fools gold and numbered accounts. Part detective work part treasure chest full of history and scandal award-winning writer Padraig Rooney takes you on a grand tour of two centuries of great writing by both Swiss and foreign authors and shows how Switzerland has always been at the center of literary Europe.