Literature as a craft: How and where do you write your first novel?

How does a writer work? »I know that there are authors who think about literary utility at every funeral, every night of love and every conversation in the bar. I don’t work like that. I would find that dishonest, perhaps even deceitful… I live because I am human. “I do my work as a writer during office hours,” writes Alex Capus about himself as a young man in “The Little House on the Sunny Slope.”

It is his eleventh novel. It takes place in the 90s. Hardly anyone had a cell phone, people were still served at gas stations, everyone smoked like there was no tomorrow, “and newspapers were read on paper.” There was also no Internet yet and the young Capus, who was currently working as a journalist who had resigned from a Swiss news agency, decides to write his first novel in a remote house that he bought for “almost no money” in Piedmont. On his lime green Hermes Baby typewriter.

His future wife Nadja also spends the summer with him. Friends also visit the aspiring writer, organizing wild rocking chair races on the terrace, shooting competitions with a rusty air rifle and singing parties.

Capus’ unaffected way of telling stories seems to be permeated by the shimmering rays of sunshine and the carefree nature of young people. You feel like you were there yourself. “It is of existential importance to me that my readership follows me captivatedly,” he writes. So much in advance: He has completely succeeded with this thoroughly complex, yet effortlessly readable book. “I’m only satisfied when everything flows and sounds correctly and, in my opinion, has found the clearest, simplest possible form” – it worked.

Nadja and his friends leave after carefree summer days and the first-person narrator remains alone. The writer can now devote himself fully to his novel again; he has no problems if he can’t think of anything: “Then I put the lid on the typewriter and went to my construction site. I always had a construction site.” Every now and then he rides his rickety bike into the village to spend the evening with Mauro, Roberto and Sergio in the same bar. Mimmo is always at the pinball machine and doesn’t speak.

But more and more fundamental ideas about writing as a craft are mixed into the description of a simple writer’s life. The narrator uses the break-in into the local church’s victim’s box, which the maresciallo (police chief) is called in to investigate, as an opportunity to reflect on causal chains in literature. He concludes that a writer – just like Maresciallo – must be able to read tracks, because “we come into the world and then a few things happen that are not necessarily related, and then we are dead. We find this idea difficult to bear. We crave meaning, so we forge causal chains and tell each other stories.”

The investigation of the theft results in an unusual arrangement: the perpetrator is not arrested and the Maresciallo even takes out his wallet. Capus describes this deal with subtle irony as “Italian-Catholic conflict management.”

As he was already writing the final version of his first novel, a dormouse made his life difficult. He tramples around in the attic all night long, chewing up cables and causing power outages. But the author can’t bring himself to hunt him down with an air rifle.

Finally, while he was briefly in Genoa, someone stole his valuable tiled stove. All traces indicate that it was one of his acquaintances from the village. The idyll has cracked, but he still doesn’t do anything. This virtuosic novel ends with the finished manuscript of the book “Munzinger Pascha”, which will be published in 1997, a shot and the sale of the house in which he was once happy. »In any case, my books are all the same. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all,” writes Capus, completely unpretentiously. That may be true from a higher perspective, but people will still read the next novel by the likeable 62-year-old author, who runs a bar in Switzerland. Ultimately, Capus, who in his own words strives to keep life and writing apart, is always able to bring them together in passing into an engaging story in his works.

Alex Capus: The little house on the sunny slope. Hanser, 160 p., hardcover, €22.

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