Erhard von Büren Book order

The novel portrays, with dry humour, delicate irony and a touch of nostalgia, the lives and feelings of young people in the late 1950s.

Summertime. While his wife and daughters are away on holiday, the husband – a librarian by profession – back home at work in the stultifying heat of a provincial Swiss town, indulges in reminiscence. With light amusement he recalls old love affairs. Memories come back of student days in Zurich and academic research in Paris, of starting family life, of trifling matters and crucial turning-points. But again and again the narrator also returns to the present; he describes his work at the library, life in his small town, acquaintances old and new and finally, in the autumn, a journey with his wife to China. The author's ironic but amiable look at life in all its diversity, the combination of laconic recounting and academic recollection, day-dreaming sequences and conscious remembering make for an enjoyable and intellectually stimulating read.

This is a vivid, unsentimental yet intensely moving portrayal of an old man who, in spite of his failing health, stubbornly continues to actively enjoy life – going to the pub, smoking and drinking, doing stonemason’s jobs, observing and commenting on the people around him. His environment and social relationships – as well as those of his son, the narrator – are portrayed with great attention to detail, providing us with an unfamiliar, realistic and sometimes humorous picture of run-of-the-mill everyday life in a provincial part of Switzerland in the 1980s. In Epitaph for a Working Man, Erhard von Büren’s laconic account, written from the son’s viewpoint, is dispassionate and occasionally harsh, but it becomes a loving homage to the father. The old man’s life is encapsulated in his final year: his toughness and his weakness, his dedication, his roughness and his gentleness.