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Beat Sterchi | Blösch | English Title: Cow<br>Novel, 448 Pages

Novel, Paperback
448 Pages
Published in May 2011

ISBN 978-3-257-21341-6
€ (D) 12.90 / (A) 13.30
sFr 21.90*
* recommended retail price

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Beat Sterchi
Blösch

English Title: Cow

A book with lasting impact. On publication in1982, Beat Sterchi caused a sensation with his novel Blösch. Now, this »mind-blowing, great book« (Basler Zeitung) is available once more. Blösch is the story of the life of a Spaniard who comes to work on a farm as a labourer, of his peaceful life with the cows – one of them named Blösch – and the not so peaceful villagers. Beat Sterchi received the ›ZDF Aspekte Literature Prize‹ for this novel. »This is the story of a foreign worker in the Switzerland of the 1960s – and also the story of a cow. And both stories belong together, for they are both the story of the used, over-used and abused creature, be it human or animal. This book sets new standards for literature and criticism.« Der Spiegel, Hamburg

QuotesShow all

»'The Cow' is extraordinary... it conveys a owerful tragi-comic sense of the reek and frenzy of the yard-workers world. The book is a kind of 'de profundis' of the cattle-sheds, a milker's epic.«Seamus Heany

»Sterchi is a kind of prose Ted Hughes: the archaic and archetypal joys of the udder were never more joyfully or lenghtily celebrated ... Sterchi’s astonishing fiction never relents ... ›The Cow‹ is a memorable and great fiction: hurt, and hurting, with the power for (one hopes) positive hurt.«The Observer

»A savage, demonic work, but also a gentle, magically lyrical one.«Die Zeit

»Sterchi's astonishing fiction is a protest against our civilisation's reliances on dirty work and wasted people, and ›Cow‹‚s larger affinities lie with hardy's Jude, modernism's stuck pig, and Kafka's K., scapegoat of scapegoats. ›Cow‹ is a memorable and great fiction: hurt, and about hurting, with the power for (one hopes) positive hurt.« London Observer

»An important ... stir-causing novel with a gentle, lyrical flavour.« London Review of Books

»›Cow‹ is firm-fleshed, straight-backed, warm, impressive, like the large Swiss cattle it describes ... an original, powerful, important novel, with a great ancient theme that is so modern and immediate as well.« Sunday Telegraph

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