Blutbuch

Kim de l'Horizon

4 ideas

1. Writing to a grandmother losing memory

   A nonbinary narrator who grew up in Ostermundigen, outside Bern, addresses the book to their grandmother ("Grossmeer") as dementia sets in, and tries to piece together a family history she never told. The reconstruction of the women in the matrilineal line is tentative and self-questioning: the narrator doubts their own sources and inventions rather than simply recovering the truth. The blood beech in the grandmother's garden recurs as a charged image for the family and what it lost.

2. Family silence transmits trauma across generations

   What a family refuses to say does not vanish. It passes down as bodily habit, shame and emotional coldness that descendants inherit without knowing where it came from. Recovering the untold history of mothers and grandmothers is how a descendant learns which of their own wounds are borrowed.

3. Dialect and standard German as class

   Swiss German, the spoken language of home and working-class origin, stands against written High German, the language of education and literature, so writing marks distance from family and class. The narrator's relation to dialect is conflicted, not simply faithful: it is the mother tongue, but it also carries the gender constraints they struggle against. The movement between registers records both social mobility and an unresolved ambivalence toward where they came from.

4. Writing the body as genealogy

   The narrator treats their queer, nonbinary body and its desires as an archive of the family, not something separate from it. They set explicit sexuality and gender experience beside ancestral history so that each explains the other. The book's shifting forms, including fragments, lists, English passages and genealogical research, enact a self that refuses one fixed category.

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