Sea, mothers, swallow, tongues A novel

A grandmother's descent into dementia causes her genderfluid grandchild to embark on an exploration of the family tree in this prize-winning debut novel from a Swiss author. In the Bernese German dialect, "grossmeer," or grandmother, translates literally to "large ocean," and the sense the narrator has of their own beloved but often troubling Grossmeer reflects this vast, enveloping unknowability. As Grossmeer's condition declines, the narrator sets out to compile the stories that form the complex throughline from their cloistered childhood in the provincial Swiss city of Ostermundigen, growing up in the house their great-grandfather built with his own hands, to their current life in Zürich as a genderfluid person with an abundant sex life. But, just as they see language as "an ocean, waving and mixing, ebbing and gushing, with no clear border," the boundaries of memory prove equally fluid. The narrator travels backward through Grossmeer's dark fairy tales of the Ostermundigen house and garden with its towering blood beech, planted on the day of Grossmeer's birth, and then even further back through the biographical research their witch-obsessed mother has done into the family's forgotten matrilineage of midwives, herbalists, and prostitutes. The resulting text is nothing so simple as a record of Grossmeer's life, or even an answer to the questions that dog her descendants' understanding of her secretive childhood, haunted by a harsh mother, dead or disappearing sisters, and the limitations placed upon her by both poverty and her gender. Rather, the narrator interrogates the "binary-fascism" of language (spoken, written, in the gestures of the body) in order to reflect the "urgent in-betweenness" forced upon them by their fluid reality in a rigidly binary world. As the narrator says, "Perhaps writing is the search for a foreign language in the words we have available to us." This book, which flits stylistically among heady fairy-tale iconography, a meticulously researched cultural history, and a sendup of high postmodern maximalism, among other modes, reinvents the narrative of the family drama not as a vehicle for the narrator's identity, but as a lucent mirror held up to the possibilities of our own. A joyous investment in the power of language to reveal and then transform. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.