Eve (Gertrud Leutenegger)

The evening before is Gertrud Leutenegger's first work, published in 1975 . Eve was her first novel and was published in 1975 . In 2005/2006, the successful book Leutenegger was included in the book series called Schweizer Bibliothek by Das Magazin . She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Prize of the Swiss Schiller Foundation for Vorabend.

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Gertrud Leutenegger writes from the perspective of a young woman who walks the route of a demonstration through the streets of Zurich the evening before. This not only describes its surroundings meticulously, but can also be distracted from what is perceived to its own past. Friendships, the first love affair, the death of the father, as well as previous acquaintances give the reader an insight into the still young life of the protagonist.

Besides the narrator and her late father, Ce and Te are the other two main characters in this book. The narrator associates a close childhood friendship with the name Ce, Te is a kind of pseudonym for her lovers. The book takes place over a period of one day. It is not only reported about these few hours, but the reader goes with the protagonist again and again on a journey through time into her past.

The narrator

The book is written from the perspective of a young woman, estimated to be around 30 years old, taking into account that it is not about the writer herself. Even if the first-person narrator has the same name as the author, Leutenegger does not report about her own life, rather she allows some of her own personal experiences and considerations to flow into it. The narrative position remains the same all the time. Everything is written from the perspective of the young woman, mainly in the form of descriptions and retelling of personal experiences. Sometimes Ce, Te or even the reader are addressed directly. However, there is never any dialogue between them.

Structure of the text

The book is divided into eleven chapters, which are called "Strassen". The eleven streets probably correspond to the demonstration route, which it runs the evening before. At the beginning the reader is mainly on the streets of Zurich . The reader never “only” stops with the narrator at the level of rational description. Often what you see triggers a chain of thoughts and feelings. Sometimes she takes the reader to other times (childhood and youth), to other places (Italy and England) or even to her fantasy world. Ultimately, the boundaries between the reproduction of their observations, their reflections, personal statements, their feelings and their memories cannot be discerned. Nevertheless one can determine different narrative levels. The road is the foundation on which the novel is built. The rapid hopping between the different levels is what makes reading this book so challenging. The structure of the evening before is reminiscent of a woven picture. The thread runs through the picture from start to finish. However, it keeps diving and reappears after a while. The same applies to the book: The urban atmosphere runs through the entire book like a red thread, sometimes disappearing, but occasionally revealing itself. The title of the various chapters brings a certain order into the protagonist's thought processes. When a topic comes to an end, you are brought back to the original level of the street, which then helps you to travel on with the young woman, to another place, to another time. However, it could also be that a chapter is finished when the young woman turns into a new street and begins at the time when she starts her way on a new street.

Form, content, language and style

The form of this text certainly makes up part of the content. The well-structured text form allows the author to jump wildly between the different topics without appearing chaotic. At first glance, the language looks relatively simple, sometimes even incomplete. But even if the language leaves a rather bumpy impression, the author creates her own work of art with her simple sentences, the resulting pictorial descriptions, the sometimes own word creations, the many foreign words as well as foreign language sentences and her imagination. Numerous metaphors contribute to the "colorful" overall picture of the text. Actual questions do not have a question mark. Menschenegger may find it superfluous to put question marks, since these are rhetorical questions where the answers are not the focus. They are more like normal sentences. Sentences at the end of the section are also often incomplete or do not have a full stop.

The title

The fact is that on the eve of a demonstration, the protagonist walks along the streets in Zurich through which the demonstrators will march the next day. The word eve actually expresses exactly what Leutenegger wants to convey in this reading. She wants to draw attention to the details in life that normally do not play the main role. Things that are always overshadowed by bigger, more exciting, more important events. The title evening before can therefore be understood to mean that the things that happen on the day itself before the actual event are the focus here in this text. It's about the fascination of expectation and the incidental, the main thing is hidden