The Gilded Chalet
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- Synopsis
- 'With a sharp eye for detail and a historian's capacious knowledge, Padraig Rooney has written a superbly amusing guide to all the writers who've been drawn to or emerged from Switzerland. This is a book that should be stuffed into every stocking - the perfect Christmas gift!' -Edmund White, author ofThe Flâneur Rainy summer of 1816. Paparazzi train their telescopes across Lake Geneva on the hanky-panky of Byron, Shelley and their womenfolk. Mary Shelley is inspired to writeFrankenstein. Byron diets and dashes offThe Prisoner of Chillon while his doctor, 'Pollydolly', gives birth toThe Vampyre. Percy Shelley almost drowns in the lake. Together they put Switzerland on the literary map. From Caesar, Rousseau and the Romantics, from Conan Doyle to le Carré, Hesse and Highsmith writers have scratched their names on the Swiss chalet. In the nineteenth century they came for fresh air, fresh milk and the sublime scenery, escaping tuberculosis and smog. Switzerland became spa central, a place of health fads, luxury hotels and nude sunbathing. Sherlock Holmes fell to his death only to be resurrected. H. G. Wells thought he'd died and gone to heaven. Hermann Hesse had himselfburied to the neck as a cure for alcoholism. Thomas Mann wroteThe Magic Mountain and lusted after the sailor suits. Neutral Switzerland became a haven in the twentieth century for Borges, Joyce, Remarque, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nabokov and Highsmith. They wrote their classic works up some secluded valley, in a coldwater flat in Zürich or in a five-star hotel. The Gilded Chalet took them in and gave them a suite with a view. Anarchists, spies and detectives came too. Sherlock Holmes, Maugham's Ashenden, Fleming's Bond, le Carré's spooks and double agents. Glauser and Dürrenmatt invented Swiss noir - not a chocolate but a style. Behind the squeaky-clean facade, Swiss and foreign writers often found something rotten in the state. Laundered art and money, the world's slush funds, daylight robbery. Switzerland's travel writers Maillart, Eberhardt, Schwarzenbach and Bouvier couldn't wait to make their escape to a bigger air and a warmer climate. The Gilded Chalet is crammed with old lederhosen and new butterflies, spas and spies, fool's gold and numbered accounts. Part detective work, part treasure chest, full of history and scandal, award-winning writer Padraig Rooney takes you on a grand tour of two centuries of great writing by both Swiss and foreign authors and shows how Switzerland has always been at the center of literary Europe.
- Copyright:
- 2015
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9781857889871
- Publisher:
- Nicholas Brealey Publishing Limited
- Date of Addition:
- 11/13/15
- Copyrighted By:
- Nicholas Brealey Publishing
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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- by Padraig Rooney
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