Year of the Drought E-Book

Roland Buti

• Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

"It was the month of June, in the year 1976. I was thirteen. It was the start of the summer holidays. It was the Year of the Drought." The Sutters have been farming on the Swiss plateau for generations, but now the household teeters on the brink of ruin. The crops are audibly roasting; the ventilators in the new hen-house are breaking down; even the family sheepdog, Sheriff, has taken to fainting in the unheard-of temperatures. When a mysterious guest arrives at the farm, she quickly becomes a focus for dreams that have long been suppressed -- of freedom, art and sex. With only his injured dove and his comic books for company, thirteen-year-old Auguste observes helplessly as his family and his carefree childhood dissolve in the heat. A tender, funny, elegiac novel about a lost rural way of life, Year of the Drought is a perfect companion to Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life. Taking place over one apocalyptic summer, it evokes several worlds -- of childhood, of traditional farming, of patriarchy -- at the very moment of their destruction.

Leseprobe

Yearof the Drought

ROLAND BUTI

TRANSLATED BY CHARLOTTE MANDELL

To my parents

Yearof the Drought

“Every sunny day that goes by is another step towards catastrophe.”

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Agriculture, June 26, 1976.

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIICopyright

I

It was the month of June, in the year 1976. I was thirteen. It was the start of the summer holidays. It was the year of the drought.

Tankers were bringing water from the lakes to the villages. Beneath a sky as yellow as corn, soldiers with their trucks and engine pumps were trying to save whatever crops could still be saved. The government had activated its emergency plan.

It hadn’t rained in weeks. It hadn’t snowed in the mountains during the winter, either, so the water table hadn’t risen in the spring. Everything below was dry, everything on the surface was dry, and our land looked like a hard, stale cracker. Some said the sun had suddenly moved closer to the earth; others that the earth had shifted its axis and drawn nearer to the sun. I myself was of the opinion that an asteroid had fallen somewhere in the area, a huge heavenly body composed of an unknown metal, and giving off invisible toxic vapours. What explanation could there be, other than gases spreading slowly towards the village and poisoning us all without our realising it, insidiously transforming my mother into another person, making us all lose control of our lives during that summer, and bringing an end to my childhood?

For days, Rudy had been telling me that the grass smelled bad. When I asked him why, he replied, sadly and seriously, that it was suffering. This was just like Rudy, to imagine that vegetable matter could manifest its discomfort by giving off a malodorous sweat. A stench of celery and sulphur floated in the air of our back garden, above its scattered tufts of sickly grass trampled by cattle. The ivy that clung to the kitchen garden wall had turned almost black. The sun heated the stone, crumpled the leaves and twisted its shrivelled stems as they made one last effort not to break off from their branches and fall to the sandy ground. When I examined the plant’s tendrils, they looked like tiny fists squeezed in despair. I had to admit that everything stank.