Literature - Series (2) Author Zora del Buono in search of two strangers
Zora del Buono lost her father at an early age. Sixty years later, the author explores the circumstances of this death in her novel "Seinetwegen" - and has been shortlisted for the Swiss Book Prize.
05.11.2024, 11:01
05.11.2024, 12:38
SDA
Zora del Buono was eight months old when her father died in a car accident in 1963. He, an Italian doctor with the prospect of a brilliant career at the University of Zurich, was 33 years old. The tragic accident left the infant with no wounds. It was only later that the void left by her father in her life would begin to hurt.
"It was nice to be alone with mom," she writes in "Seinetwegen". Neither for the child nor for her as a young woman was fatherlessness a burden. She didn't even know him. Moreover, the mother seemed to be coping well with the situation; she did not remarry and went her own professional way.
Uznach, Näfels, Kaltbrunn
Gradually, however, the three "bad words" Uznach, Näfels and Kaltbrunn have an effect on the author. The death of her father echoes in them. The lack of memory of him and her mother's progressive dementia trigger Zora del Buono's desire to get to the bottom of the circumstances of the accident. Above all, she wants to know who the "killer" of her father is. She only knows his initials E.T. from the files.
The volume "Seinetwegen" is the record of a very personal investigation. Little by little, Zora del Buono weaves insights and associations into a multi-faceted, multi-layered collage in which central questions crystallize. What does it mean to grow up without a father? What is it like to live with the guilt of having someone on your conscience?
The author follows social, familial and personal traces. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes casually, she travels to the area of Uznach, Näfels and Kaltbrunn to see the crime scene, look for files, ask around and speculate about where and how the unknown E.T. might have lived.
A web of connections
During her search, Zora del Buono comes across strange coincidences. All of a sudden, tragic accidents and fatherlessness are piling up in her own environment. And when she reads "Diary of Grief" by the philosopher Roland Barthes, she discovers that he too grew up fatherless; Barthes died in 1980 after being hit by a milk truck in Paris.
The title "Because of Him" responds to a whole bundle of questions. Zora del Buono also discovers the "own deformations" that the early death of her father left behind in her despite everything: a "strange emotional coldness towards the lamenting, grieving abandoned" or the "solitary existence".
Her essayistic book impresses with its touching intimacy and the alert curiosity with which Zora del Buono places her personal story in a larger social context. Gradually, the picture of E.T., who has since passed away, becomes clearer. Nothing was exactly as it was reported. The new aspects do not undo anything, only make it easier to understand, perhaps.*
*This text by Beat Mazenauer, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
