69. Survivor | Julie Guinand

translated from the french by rosie eyre

WHAT IF, JUST like that, the world as we know it ended?

Friends,

One of my goals for 2024 is to read more translated works¹

I stumbled upon this Swiss series called +SVIZRA which is a series of 8 chapbooks² showcasing contemporary writing from the four official languages of Switzerland: German, French, Italian and Romansh. In giving equal visibility and weight to each of the four languages, +SVIZRA offers a range of Swiss writing never before seen in English from a diverse group of some of the best authors living and working in Switzerland today, including National Literature Prize winning Anna Ruchat, Iraqi exile Usama Al-Shahmani, and Romansh author, Rut Plouda.

Survivor by Julie Guinard (translated from the French by Rosie Eyre³) is the first I’ve read of the series.

Written in the style of a personal diary (DAY 1; DAY 37 etc), the book starts with the author, an aspiring writer living in a remote hamlet on the Swiss-French border, waking up to a power cut and the internet having gone down.

“In the ten months since we moved to Maison-Monsiuer, there have been four, maybe five power cuts. No biggie, then. But as I press away like a nutter on the lamp switch, my heart can’t help staggering ever so slightly. I suddenly feel chilled to the bone. My phone is displaying ‘No Service’. Weird. I reach for the landline and punch in the number for the electrician. No dial tone. I pretend not to notice.”

Outside the birds have stopped singing, there is no traffic and everything is silent. And so begins her diary of the end of the world.

Things I loved about the book:

• it grabs your attention from the first page

• it’s timely and apt because the world feels apocalyptic right now

• it reminded me of the pandemic and how the forced solitude made some of us spend far too much time in our heads creating dramatic scenarios

• when the author panics she makes lists to feel like she’s in control and that’s a habit of mine too

• she’s afraid but also brave and hilarious at the same time

Post-apocalyptic more in the challenge it throws out to its readers than in its form, Survivor intelligently questions our relationship to solitude, separation and change.

1. https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5097472-nicole-costello?shelf=2024-translated

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapbook

3. Rosie Eyre is a literary translator and editor working from French and Spanish. She studied Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge and completed an MA in Translation Studies at the University of Manchester, where she was awarded the department’s Best Scholar Prize. From 2020–2021 she was the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator mentee for Swiss French and she won Third Prize in the 2021 John Dryden Translation Competition for an extract from French novelist Alpheratz’s Requiem, which later appeared in the Journal of Comparative Critical Studies. Her previous published translations include Caring in Times of Covid-19 (2020), a book by photojournalist Juan Zarza documenting the work of Madrid collectives during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 100 First Words for Toddlers (2021), a bilingual picture book for young learners of French.