“You’re the boss, applesauce – lights out.”
“Do no harm – hadn’t he done only a little?”
Emma Cline’s Switzy is the last of the Booker longlist for me, and much like the rest of the longlist, it deals with loneliness, memory, and a rewriting of the past. David Hastings has Alzheimer’s disease, and he has made preparations for an assisted death in Switzerland. (Hence the “Switzy” title.) The novel opens with Hastings on a plane flying to London to see his daughter before proceeding to Zurich. (Dementia pops up in numerous books from the longlist, from major plot points to minor details.) His life and all its transgressions flash before his eyes, fragmented memories snagged by the passage of time and lost to the amyloids.
For me, a large part of the focus was his childhood friendship with Tom. And that’s a slow burn without much resolution, but there’s no other way to really handle it; you wouldn’t want Tom to embrace him. The awkwardness of the painful encounter goes unnoticed by David, thanks to the disease that continues to eat away at him, but I’m not sure the payoff was there for the reader.
David isn’t likeable, but the writing is. I enjoyed the fragmented approach, the flashes of memory, and the snippets of self-realization that he hadn’t been the best friend, husband, father, or coworker. Snippets. He is, until the very end, David Hastings. The writing is sharp even when his memories aren’t. The repetition, the stream of consciousness, the quick brown fox… it all works extremely well.
It’s not my favorite from the list, and I’m unlikely to read anymore Cline, but it’s a solid entry on the longlist.
#booker101 #bookerprizelonglist #switzy
A Girl Named Tommi 