The Swiss List: The Blue Soda Siphon (Hardcover)

In The Blue Soda Siphon, first published in 1992, the narrator unexpectedly finds himself back in the world of his childhood (wartime Switzerland in the 1940s)—and the young boy that he was back then turns up in the present of the early 1990s (the period of the first Gulf War) and meets the narrator’s young daughter.

These switches happen when both the adult narrator and his boyhood self go to the cinema and see films, the action of which at times echoes their own situations. In the first part of the book, the narrator returns to the 1940s and his childhood home just as his boyhood self has gone missing and his frantic parents are visited by police officers. In the second part, the boy loses his chaperone at the cinema and ends up visiting the home and meeting the daughter of his adult self. This novel in which the blue soda siphon bottle of the title is a recurring symbol, is a magnificent example of Urs Widmer’s characteristic humour and literary genius.