Among the ›Papers of an Immune Man‹ can be found the story of a man who invites guests to his own funeral feast as well as the story of another man who plans an assassination in a house of waxworks; the reader encounters a puppet murderer, a sinful priest; a rebel from the Peasants' War; a nursery rhyme becomes a political issue; and Leporello's aria of the cities can be heard. This and other ›papers‹ are mirrors and counter-images of the immune man, his interpretations and longings…

Hugo Loetscher first travelled to Brazil in 1965. Thus began a love that never let the cosmopolitan Swiss writer out of its grip. Hugo Loetscher returned again and again, writing travelogues about Brazil for various newspapers, as well as the novel Wonder World. Eventually, he went beyond the seductions of the exotic to explore the contradictions of the land of his desires. A timelessly contemporary portrait of a country which, in Hugo Loetscher’s words, is still »condemned to the future«. »Brazil was also a form of travelling in my consciousness. The adventure. The fascination of the unfamiliar. The lure of the unknown. But then, behind all the exotic and the tropical, the discovery of the country’s social reality. The encounter with another world that has more to do with ours than we are generally willing to accept.« Hugo Loetscher

He was famous, but he was the only one who knew it. But never mind, he had his whole life ahead of him. Philipp, poised between school-leaving and professional training, dreams of becoming an actor and spends the summer working as a beach attendant. Real life serves as a dress rehearsal for Philipp's first season. With a fertile, unencumbered imagination, he turns a Zurich lake bathing spa into a colourful and exciting stage, a scene in which figures of our contemporary society, stripped of their disguises, are revealed in their true colours. The author writes in a vivid, pithy language and with an enigmatic wit which injects poetry into the irony. Philipp's first season - »It's not for nothing that I have just turned twenty« - is also the setting of a tender love story.

»Los Angeles, the Big Orange, lots of segments around nothing. In such segments he had spent his autumn. How green was this autumn.« Loetscher's melancholy satire revolves around the theme of ›autumn‹ in many ways: the season in a landscape between desert and ocean in which, strictly speaking, there is no autumn; autumn in the protagonist's life; and, ultimately, the autumn of a civilisation.

For the immune man, the world, from his earliest childhood, is a stage. He nevertheless uses his talent for telling stories and observing the world in order to 'immunise' himself against brutality and hypocrisy. How else could one suffer this world? In a self-critical analysis of the I in the form of an abundance of short stories, Hugo Loetscher describes the epoch in which this ego developed.

From the Alps to urbanity: It is not in Albrecht von Haller's glorification of the Alps that Loetscher sees the origins of Swiss literature, but rather in the autobiography of Thomas Platter, the country lad who leaves the mountains to try his luck in Basle, the city of humanism. Thus we are afforded an unconventional outlook, through and beyond literature, on an identity stretching from Salomon Gessner's false flute idyll to the uncomfortable atmosphere of Gottfried Keller's Seldwyla, from the hasty shelters of Ludwig Hohl to Adrien Turel's yearning for the future. A remarkable gallery of figures is thereby assembled, including the »poor devil« Friedrich Glauser, the unusual Marxist Konrad Farner and the gifted »phoney« Blaise Cendrars. The essays are not wholly impersonal when the author writes of his »difficult admiration« for Max Frisch or his remembrances of Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who plays a leading role in this collection. One learns a few things about people such as Adolf Muschg and Niklaus Meienberg in a Swiss chat room. Whatever the debate at hand, those who read instead of climb will once again enjoy brilliant essays by Hugo Loetscher.

A stroll through literature and myths. Animals, allegedly the brothers and sisters of humankind, are used by people not only for their physical needs - without animals, literature and painting would be very different from what we are accustomed to. As if being an animal wasn't hard enough to begin with - human beings humanized animals. One of the consequences: they began to speak. And thanks to their humanization, the animals behaved like reasonable people, nothing humans was alien to them. Hugo Leotscher has gathered incredible material from all the nooks and crannies of world literature and shows that almost no author known to us could have lived and written in the absence of animals. Remember Kafka and the beetle...

The stories told by Hugo Loetscher are conduct fables. The animals do not talk like humans but behave like animals, though in situations not always of their own choosing such as the mule in the army, the poodle at the beauty contest, the monkey in the rocket or the rat in the laboratory. A ›comédie animale‹ whose morality lies in its depiction.

»So an author has managed to surpass the age of seventy. And now, after publishing novels and short stories, essays and lectures on poetic theory, after compiling commentaries and reports, he has turned his hand to poetry,« writes Hugo Loetscher in his ›Introduction to myself. On the treatment of the lyrical.‹ The poetic culmination of an author who describes himself in one of his poems as a »cartographer of the void«, whose »bird of love« is a bat and whose roots are »aerial roots«. Poems, searching images, »feelings expressed in proper grammar«, melancholy, playful, trance-like and with a perceptive presence - a lyric commentary on the »commonplace«.

A boy sits on a river and puts his wooden boat to the water, a messenger quickly drifting downstream and announcing: Someone will follow. The boy became a man and a writer. And he did follow: In the tracks of the little boat of his childhood river, the Sihl in Zurich, he went as far as the Nile, the Amazon and the Yangtze. Hugo Loetscher takes stock of his life. He unfolds the themes of his life and work into a world-embracing autogeography, thus telling of the development of a global consciousness. Taking the reader along rivers, past bridges and canals to new shores, Hugo Loetscher's narrative flow is meandering, deep and effervescent with ideas and wit. The picture of a great writer takes shape, born unsolicited under the star constellation of the question mark. A doubter who knows that questions are often more beautiful than answers. And an incorrigible humanist.

Can blue eyes see? asked the mandarin when he encountered European barbarians for the first time. Can blue-green eyes see? asks Past. Not at the Imperial Court of Peking, but in a European city like Zurich, a good three hundred years later. Not in a realm faced with the decline of its dominion, but on a continent that has lost its significance. The question about the ability of his eyes to see reminds Past, an ex-employee of an obscure cultural foundation and specialist for commemoration days and New Year celebrations, of incidents from his eventful life. It leads him back to almost all parts of the earth, it evokes penetrating stories and anecdotes, with a disturbing, intoxicating juxtaposition of continents, times and images in which boundaries and centres dissolve and the familiar is revealed in the alien and the alien in the familiar. A balance of an intensive life by an eternally curious man who thinks on a wide scale merely for professional reasons, and who is full of vitality, scepticism and thoughtfulness – and of a serenity reminiscent of the Far East.

In these nineteen stories, many of them hitherto unpublished, there is one theme that constantly returns: ›Der Buckel‹ is about damaged people, the cast-outs and under-privileged, who furnish a telling example of Hugo Loetscher's narrative range and variety. The stories are told with unfailing artistry, precision and cryptic irony. Their playful lightness of touch and pleasure in yarn-spinning do not hide the fact that it is precisely man's vulnerability that can be translated into literature.