Laura Vogt Das Jahr des Kalks
[The Year of Limestone]

The unusual tone of this novel is set from the first sentences: ‘Traces of water – of rain – mixed with traces of reproduction: a yellowish film of pollen, dried in a pattern of drops, clings to the windowpane in front of me, the window in front of my desk. They are traces of an attempt to live on, an attempt to stay in the world.’ What happens when someone is at risk of losing a person who is important in their life? First, there is a change in the way they look at things. It may sound like a paradox, but they begin to look more closely. They fixate on details, inclined to see them as symbols for the bigger picture. Materiality becomes more important because something material is under threat – a person’s body.

It takes a deep knowledge of the world to understand this and, for all its stylistic restraint, The Year of Lime, the fourth novel by Swiss writer Laura Vogt (born in 1989), is an extraordinarily wise and worldly book. The premise: first-person narrator, Alina, a writer and artist, has a studio only a few buildings away from the hospital where her Uncle Per is dying. This man, who has been more than an uncle to her, was diagnosed with cancer a year ago. Now Alina is waiting to hear from the hospital so that she can say goodbye to him. Per, her father’s brother, was there for Alina when her father left the family. Alina remembers holidays with him, hikes in the mountains, moments of closeness. And she takes stock of her adult life, as a wife and a mother of two.

All this may sound rather conventional but, in fact, the novel is anything but. Variations on the theme of lime and dust run through the narrative like a leitmotif: Alina’s father has left his family in the dust; Per, her uncle, awaits the fate of humans as decreed in Genesis: ‘dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’; her grandfather was a chemical lab assistant and a stone carver, who devoted his life to minerals and the nature of rocks. In Vogt’s novel, everything is intimately connected: ‘Things come, things go. Animals live, animals die. Meanwhile, on land, in the sea, in lakes and rivers, deposits accumulate; material is consolidated, dehydrated and compressed to form layers of sediment.’

It is the buried matter hidden in the sediments of memory that Vogt’s narrator attempts to uncover. Alina signs up for a course in preservation at the dinosaur museum. ‘Preserving relics,’ she thinks, ‘maybe that’s all I’m good for at the moment.’ The Year of Lime is free of all sentimentality. It is a subtly written, tightly woven text that asks questions without spelling them out and feels its way towards possible responses rather than providing answers. In this open-ended exploration, there is great comfort.