Monica Cantieni

Twice a week my wife goes to this German language course put on for beginners by the town council. She's the only English-speaker there, surrounded by a kaleidoscope of new arrivals from Eritrea, Serbia, Cuba, Lithuania, with many of whom we have become quite good friends. Many are here on work placements, but some have been granted asylum here and have heart-stopping stories to tell of how and why they came into the country.

These stories were very much on our minds as we followed the depressing response to the so-called migrant crisis, and for a while there I was coming home from work to find Hannah in tears every night scrolling through news reports. So I thought this might be a timely read for some of the Swiss context, set as it is during the referendum of 1970, which asked voters to decide on whether to restrict ‘foreign infiltration’.

The subject is a very crucial one for Switzerland, whose proportion of foreign-born population, at nearly 24 percent, is almost the highest in the world. The country's prosperous economy depends heavily on shipping in vast quantities of skilled foreign workers; and in the event, the initiative of 1970 was narrowly defeated 54 percent to 46 percent. Several similar proposals in following years were likewise rejected, the Swiss in general opting for economic success over cultural homogeneity.

Anyway, given all this background stuff, I should have really liked this book, which is told from the point of view of an adopted immigrant girl and the multicultural environment she grows up in (in a Swiss city I couldn't identify – I think Zurich). But unfortunately it's mostly unsuccessful. The characters are not sufficiently distinguished from each other and the prose style is telegraphic to the point of being often incoherent. I might be tempted to suspect the translator, but in this case it's Donal McLaughlin who is consistently brilliant so I believe it's just a problem with the writing.

Shame, because the subject matter is only getting more relevant. Last year, after this book's publication, the right-wing Swiss People's Party launched another yet proposal ‘against mass immigration’, which this time passed by a whisker (50.33 to 49.67 percent). Looks like I just snuck in in time….… (mais)