ABSTRACT
Born in Rapperswil on Lake Zurich, Späth trained as an organ-builder and travelled in various parts of Switzerland before becoming a professional writer in 1968 and settling in his birthplace, where he found the model for the small-town settings of his works, comparable to the Seldwyla of his nineteenth-century compatriot Gottfried Keller. In a remarkably consistent œuvre he has proved himself a master of the picaresque novel in the tradition of Rabelais, Grimmelshausen and Grass: especially in Unschlecht (1970), in which the title-figure, after receiving his patrimony, is exploited by neighbours, runs away, travels Europe, marries an heiress, regains his property and returns in triumph; in Stimmgänge (1972), in which an organ-builder, having failed to make the fortune without which he cannot become his grandmother’s sole legatee, writes his life story for his absent wife while confined to hospital by an injury; and in Balzapf oder Als ich auftauchte (1977), in which the fortunes of the Zapfen family are traced over four generations. In Die heile Hölle (1974), a short novel lacking the baroque extravagance of these works, Späth removes the mask of conformity from a middle-class family by giving an account of a critical day in the lives of each of its members. Both Commedia (1980), in which over two hundred portrait sketches ostensibly produced by their subjects precede the story of a guided tour of a castle museum which goes wrong, and Barbarswila (1988), which portrays one day in the lives of the inhabitants of a small Swiss town, achieve a panoramic effect by the accumulation of numerous vignettes. Späin’s short stories have appeared in the volumes Zwölf Geschichten (1973), Sacramento (1983), Sindbadland (1984) and Verschwinden in Venedig (1986). Stilles Gelände am See (1991) and Das Spiel des Sommers neunundneunzig (1993) are further novels, the latter set in Ireland.
