Review of Arnon Grünberg’s novel “Gstaad”

It is as if Sigmund Freud wrote this story: Arnon Grünberg’s novel “Gstaad”, which talks about a trickster.

g“Staad 95-98” is the name of the novel published by Arnon Grunberg in the Netherlands in 2002. He published it under the pseudonym Marek van der Jagt. The text has now also been published in German in a translation by Rainer Kirsten in The Other Library, with the numbers in the title deleted. The book is divided into episodes; The final film takes place at the Palace Hotel in Gstaad, where François Lepeltier, under the name Bruno Ritter, murders a ten-year-old girl with whom he has fallen in love. The echoes of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita are clear: the Russian-American author spent the last years of his life near the setting of Grunberg’s text, at the Swiss Hotel Montreux Palace.

“Guestad” is a fragmentary novel set in the last third of the twentieth century and describes the life of François Lepeltier from his birth until his arrest. The story is told from the perspective of the protagonist, sometimes switching to a third-person perspective. In contrast to Gunter Grass’s “The Tin Drum” or Thomas Mann’s “Confessions of a Fraudster Felix Kroll,” Grünberg uses simple structured language close to oral speech.