The Gilded Chalet: Off-Piste in Literary Switzerland - Hardcover

Padraig Rooney was born in Ireland and studied at Maynooth College and at the Sorbonne. When he was sixteen he first came to Switzerland, saw the Rolling Stones in Berne, and never looked back. He has lived in Switzerland for fifteen years, and teaches English at International School Basel. He worked as a freelance travel writer for many years, for the Irish Times, Irish Press, Sunday Tribune, Bangkok Post, and many Asian magazines.

www.padraigrooney.com

My compatriot James Joyce eloped from Ireland in borrowed boots in 1904. He fled both world wars to the safety of Zürich. War too caught the fifteen-year-old Borges in Geneva, where his dad arranged for the boy to get laid. Ian Fleming was recovering from a dose of the clap. The seventeen-year-old John Le Carré turned spy in Berne and polished his German. It would prove useful. For all of them Switzerland was a hideout, a refuge, the quiet good place.
Switzerland took writers in, sometimes grudgingly, often with good grace. It gave them a room with a view and a place at the table maybe not the Stammtisch, but you can’t have everything. Service was brisk and efficient, the wine not too bad, the food rough and ready but nourishing. Demi-pension.

You’re a writer, are you? We’ve had a few of those.

And the writers responded by doing what they do best: reportage, poems, horror fiction, travelogue, novel, detective fiction, great modern masterpiece, murder mystery. Biting the hand that fed them. Pointing out the dry rot. Suggesting there’s a smell under the floorboards. Often enough writers just got on with it - up some secluded valley or in a flat in Münchenstein. From time to time there was fruitful exchange between the local scribblers and the blow-ins. But this being Switzerland they kept a wary eye on each other, knowing they might just be passing through, merely taking shelter from the storm.