Filter
Melody
In a villa on Zurich’s hillside lives aging Dr Stotz, surrounded by portraits of a young woman. Melody was once his fiancée, but shortly before the wedding – more than forty years ago – she vanished. Stotz has never recovered from his loss.
To organise his estate, Stotz hires a young student who urgently needs this job. Little by little, Tom begins to wonder whether Stotz is really who he pretends to be.
On a Greek island, he stumbles across a peculiar trail.
336 pages
2023
978-3-257-07234-1
»One gets caught up in it unawares, reads without pause, then one is out again, released from a world of events and destinies.«
»In this respect, Melody is a homage to storytelling. And at the same time, the novel makes clear that narratives always lie.«
»Time passes, love remains. The faithful motto above the door lintel is fulfilled contrarily to that which the householder had imagined.«
»In this novel, at least, nothing is what it pretends to be. That makes it appealing to the end.«
»Martin Suter's Melody is an entertainingly written, easy-to-read novel with a clear cast of characters, a few voltes and pirouettes in the text, served up with a good dose of humour.«
»And his novel is more than a dramatic love story: In subtle ways, Suter explores, sometimes quite amusingly, the question of how we remember – which stories we tell about ourselves and for what reason. Which truths we conceal in order to protect ourselves«
»With the current book Melody he has succeeded in creating a true gem of his storytelling art.«
»So what endures at the end of a lifetime? Martin Suter has no answer. But he has written a great novel about it.«
»Nothing human is alien to Suter, so many varieties of humanity are familiar to him because he is an outrageously astute observer.«
»With Melody, the now 75-year-old Swiss [. . .] once again displays his mastery of bringing characters and settings to life with just a few strokes of his understated but powerful language. And his novel is more than a dramatic love story.«
»He gives his audience what they want, never disturbing them. This is an art that comes from skill.«
»This wonderfully romantic story is a captivating read, as well as an extended meditation on truth, memory, and the nature and purpose of storytelling.«
»You can't put the book down. Suter is at the peak of his narrative art.«
»Melody is a libretto to the art of trickery that could hardly be more lucent.«
» [. . .] Melody is a really good book. One that you say goodbye to sadly because it's of that lightness that has its ground in valentinesque gravitas.«
»Suter again narrates with full passion, cleverly, in the linguistically simple and thrilling mystery-deciphering mode that has made him famous.«
»If we tell ourselves and others our life story often enough, it will come true - that is the insight behind this seductive novel.«
»And yet the book is also amusing, with its almost tongue-in-cheek exaggerated plot, the surprising twists and turns and the almost provocative ending: Melody - in other words, another treat for Suter fans.«
»It remains very very exciting until the end.«
»... the writer Martin Suter not only delivers a compelling suspense story, but also a brilliant reflection about the relationship between reality and fiction, between wrong truths and true lies.«
»A gripping suspense story coupled with a brilliant reflection on the relationship between reality and fiction.«