Surviving the heatwave
A Swiss family suffering through the drought of 1976 is hemmed in on all sides in this atmospheric short novel, writes Roger Cox
The last few years have seen some notable triumphs for writers who believe that less is more. Perhaps most obviously, Austria’s Robert Seethaler made the Man Booker International shortlist in 2016 for A Whole Life, in which he somehow managed to concertina the epic, century-spanning story of a farmer turned cable car engineer turned soldier turned mountain guide into just 124 pages. Then there’s the Dutch author Otto De Kat (the pen-name of retired publisher Jan Geurt Gaarlandt) who pulled off a similar trick in his Second World War novellas Man on the Move (2004, 128 pages), Julia (2011, 194 pages) and News From Berlin (2014, 152 pages).
Meanwhile, here in the UK, Megan Hunter’s haunting dystopian novella The End We Start From, published earlier this year, ran to just 127 pages, yet still felt cinematic in scope – so cinematic, in fact, that Benedict Cumberbatch had snapped up the movie rights before it even landed in bookshops.
All of which brings us to Roland Buti’s 148-page Year of the Drought – first published in the author’s native Switzerland in 2014, where it won the Swiss Literature Prize, and now translated into English by Charlotte Mandell.
Unlike the heroes of Seethaler, De Kat and Hunter, who cover a lot of ground in a limited number of pages, Buti’s 13-year-old protagonist Gus (short for Auguste) barely leaves his family’s farm in the Canton of Vaud in French-speaking Switzerland. The claustrophobic setting, however, is a key element of the story Buti is trying to tell. An elevator pitch for this book might go something like: “imagine an agricultural version of A Streetcar
Named Desire, only with a few kids thrown into the emotional pressure cooker along with the adults.”
Year of the Drought is set in the scorching summer of 1976 and, as it’s the school holidays, Gus and his family are hemmed in both by the boundaries of the farm, where they rarely receive visitors, and by an oppressive, cloudless sky that seems to weigh heavily on everyone and is referenced so many times it almost becomes an extra character.
Gus lives with his taciturn father, (“powerful, heavy”), his stand-offish mother (“such a slender being... that I had lived inside her womb for many months seemed nothing less than a miracle”), his older sister Léa, who “could always find good reasons not to take part in our shared life” and Rudy, a distant cousin with Down’s Syndrome who came to live and work on the farm before Gus was born.
The shared life of habits and routines that Léa does her best to avoid seems harmonious enough to
begin with, if a little joyless, but it is brought crashing down by the arrival of Cécile, a friend of Gus’s mother’s “from before” who seems to embody the escapist dreams of at least two members of the family.
Gus’s father is a dairy farmer, but in a bid to improve the family finances he has borrowed money to buy hundreds of chickens which he is now trying to fatten up and sell. Each day, however, as the sun beats down relentlessly on their enormous shed, more and more of the unfortunate birds die of heat exhaustion, and have to be bagged up and removed.
As the financial woes of farm intensify and the relationships that bind the family together are tested to breaking point, Buti expertly ratchets up the tension before delivering a finale that is both a literal and metaphorical cloudburst – explosive, cathartic and surprisingly moving.