To recognize what is absurd and to accept it need not dim the eye for the tragic side of existence, quite on the contrary, in the end it may perhaps help in gaining a more tolerant view of the world.
—Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear

The prolific Swiss writer Urs Widmer is a prominent figure in German literature, yet he is all but unknown to English readers. He has written more than two dozen works of fiction, almost thirty radio plays, a dozen theater plays, and a half dozen collections of essays, including those he delivered in the prestigious Frankfurt Poetics Lectures series in 2006.

His writing, though serious and finely crafted, is full of tomfoolery, wry deadpan humor, and implausible plot twists. One of his novels, for example, is narrated by a two-inch plastic dwarf. Still, a powerful current of pathos flows beneath Widmer’s antic surfaces. His book would sit firmly on a Polonial “Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral” literary matrix, though dominating the first and second quadrants and touching the last two lightly.

In one of his lectures, Widmer enumerates the reasons he writes. He begins by extolling the childlike playfulness in creating literature, its dilettantish joys, and the writer’s lifelong ability to tap into childhood’s “naïve-archaic modes of thinking and feeling, albeit in a more refracted, furtive, and less optimistic manner.” Only then does Widmer address the confessional impulse that animates the creation of many literary works and the writer’s quixotic compulsion to master suffering