The weather maker
Der Wettermacher (published in 1993) is the first work of the Swiss author Peter Weber .
Summary of the plot
August Abraham Abderhalden, the book's protagonist and first-person narrator, puts on his father's information officer hat on March 31, 1990, the eve of his twentieth birthday, and, inspired by it, begins his previous life, that of his family, in a cellar Describing Toggenburg and numerous other, sometimes very bizarre expressionist events.
One focus of the work is the grief of August Abraham over their childhood together and the suicide of his black adoptive brother Friday, who sought his death in the floods of the Thur. August and Friday grew up in Toggenburg with their infertile adoptive parents Ute and Melchior. After the war they met at the train station, the kiosk woman Ute from Berlin and the provincial Melchior, who bought cigarettes from her. After the suicide on Friday, the family moved to Zurich . Another aspect is the grief of August Abraham about the time in Toggenburg and the increasing "Americanization" of Switzerland.
Division of the book into different storylines
The hat, the table
In these episodes the narrator steals into the cellar along with a mechanical typewriter after receiving a “real black conductor hat from the Swiss Federal Railways” as a birthday present.
The narrator noticeably often uses the weather vocabulary in the passages when he is sitting at the table in the cellar with a candle and you could replace “weather” with “writing” at any time. This means making weather conditions as a synonym for writing. Weber always manages to push behind the façades of everyday life with his language. A kitchen table is a kitchen table, but for him it is also one of those tables where “countries are tailored, fates are sealed and heads are broken” or for him it is a “loom” on which he weaves stories.
Sections with the table appear again and again at the beginning of new narrative directions and are the parts of the book that lie in the present. This gives Weber the impression that the book is being written almost at the moment we read it.
The hat is also a symbol that appears again and again. When the narrator gets a kind of writer's block (p. 86), “the thread of his parents is torn,” he takes possession of his father's hat and soon returns to the cellar to continue writing his story. It is not for nothing that the hat is an information officer's hat. Those convey an impression of omniscience, especially on the narrator, who grew up with such an information officer as his father. The hat also appeals to the narrator insofar as it makes it clear to him that he is the weather maker.
The story of the mother, the story of the father, The interweaving of both stories
The stories of the father and mother of the adopted child August Abraham are first told separately from one another, as "separate parenting threads". The narrator speaks to the parents and tells their story. The narrator is not necessarily omniscient, he suspects certain things, sometimes just imagines them and works with many questions for the parents. After the writer's block, which the narrator overcomes with the hat, the person he is speaking to changes: now his brother appears on Friday and he tells him the further story of his parents. This creates a break with the previously separate parenting stories, now the two strands are linked into one: "Your father came from above. Your mother came from below. They met at the train station after the war."
The story of the narrator August Abraham and his brother Friday, typewriters, childhood, youth
After a brief return to the present on March 30, 1990 in Zurich, the narrator is again forced by the hat to tell his own story. Again he speaks to his brother Friday. This story begins with Abraham's training as a typewriter mechanic.
Here it becomes clear that Peter Weber wrote the book at a time when the change from analog to digital was in full swing. After the typewriter, the story jumps back to August Abraham's earliest childhood and is then chronological, but is interrupted by sometimes very absurd stories and descriptions of Toggenburg. Death on Fridays plays an increasingly important role, after all, the topic of “Friday” is increasingly gaining control over the narrative. His death / disappearance leads August Abraham to a broken jaw, a resulting loss of language and to admission to the clinic for the difficult to educate.
Friday's disappearance / death is unclear until the end of the book. The book ends with the sentence: “It was here in the city that I was able to look through and into the open under the weather for the first time.” The excerpt from the narrow Toggenburg, away from antennas and garages into the city, appears as a path to get rid of the past.
Quotes
- "Elvis was God (...), that's why he swallowed pills. (...) America swallowed Europe or salivated it."
- "My first texts were created in the threshold between analog and digital, also formally, I transferred the early versions, typed on soft, springy, mechanical machines to the screen, which loosened the rhythmic structure: the texts became liquids, transparent, could be swimmed through, I was able to pour surfaces without using scissors and glue. ”(Peter Weber: Switzerland is a city, the German language is an event. In: BELLA triste No. 6, 2003.)