Those who believe that to read Shakespeare in anything but the original is nothing short of sacrilege have obviously never read Urs Widmers retelling of Shakespeares King plays! Widmer has transposed Shakespeares seven plays about betrayal, intrigue, murder and war at the English court into riveting, condensed prose an engaging introduction into a universe of hundreds of characters, but also pure pleasure for Shakespeare-lovers. Although Urs Widmers version remains true to the originals, he recounts the dramas as only he can with imagination and a modern touch, seen from a plethora of perspectives and told in a huge variety of voices, at times pure fairy tale, at times prose, but always captivating. All of this in Widmers inimitable style, as we know it from his successful novels ›A Devoted Life‹ and ›The Book of the Father‹. I imagined throughout that I was recounting events from earlier times, and not that I was describing the theatrical inventions of a writer named Shakespeare. All in all, I have attempted to bring together two ambitions: to write stories at once good and which, irrespective of their literary qualities, can be read as a summary of the original (Urs Widmer in his Introduction).

Kuno, a male nurse in an old people's home, has a new inmate: his father. In the isolation of the home, they finally start talking. Kuno had always regarded his father as boring, a man without a history and without a destiny – until one day he realises that he had once risked his life in the war. His ageing father had a destiny, and what a destiny! This realisation changes Kuno's life, and he embarks on a journey into his own psyche which takes him to the depths of the Congo. Longings awaken and dreams come true – rays of light in the darkness, meetings with kings, seductive women and the songs of the jungle: the alluring faraway places which he once regarded as the heart of darkness become an adventurous, exciting scene of lunacy, wildness and a test of his own inner strength.

In the novella ›The Paradie of Oblivion‹, Widmer is trying to square the circle: for how do you write a story that is about fading and disappearing memory? Indeed, although without memory no story can be told, the novella ambivalently (for the loss of our memory could well be a curse) seems to praise the fading of memory. Thus he who is devoid of memory is no longer haunted by the dreadful images of his past.

The same family story told from two different, independent perspectives: Urs Widmer’s two hit novels, now in one volume.

My Mother’s Lover
Clara’s lifelong unrequited love for the famous conductor Edwin, mapped out by her son. A novel about music, money and power, and about reversing roles.

My Father’s Book
He loves friends, women, parties. Most of all, though, he loves books. The chronicle of a passionate life determined by a love of literature. And by his love for Clara Molinari, his wife.

The two novels also tell of the twentieth century’s great utopias, hopes and disappointments.

An anticipated farewell. Fears already lived through. The great obsession of humanity who cannot bring it under control even with rites and age-old myths. A life towards death, told with heart warming cheerfulness. It is Friday, 22 May 2032. One day after his ninety-fourth birthday, a man sits in a lush blooming garden – it is the paradise garden of his childhood – with a recorder beside him, and tapes his story with Mr. Adamson. He tells his story to us, but most of all to Annie, his grand daughter. And he is waiting – for the very same Mr. Adamson whom he hasn't seen since he was eight years old. It was a strange encounter. A glimpse into areas which are usually concealed from the living. A grandiose book whose vitality and love of life manages to banish what is the scandal of every life: death.

Driven out of his home, our hero wanders helplessly through the streets, ends up at the railway station, gets into a train going to Basel, his home town – and finds himself back in the past, in his youth. Nothing has changed at his parent's home – even the soda siphon by the side of his father's bottles of spirits. But his parents do not recognise the stranger who arrived on their doorstep, and they miss their small son. A journey in time through several screens begins.

When she meets him, in the town by the lake in the 1920s, she is young, beautiful and rich, while he – though also young – is penniless, with only one thought in his head: music. New music. His great dream is to find an orchestra to play Bartók, Krenek and Prokofiev – all the young, unknown composers. At the end of her life, he is a famous conductor and the richest man in the country, and she is poor and still driven by her unceasing love for him – which neither he nor anyone else knows about. ›My Mother's Lover‹ is the story of a woman's dumb, obsessive passion, described by her son. It is the narration of a lifelong tragedy written from a reserved distance which almost transforms pain into serenity.

The story line is a »pilgrimage, which zigzags around an earth full of puzzles, often heavenly, sometimes hellish. Is it the way there? Is it the way back?« At first glance, Lustig's pictures seem poetic, uncanny and playful; but their pretty surface is »like a thin shell under which terrible things are found.« The pilgrimage deals with the end of the world, the great stillness, profound boundlessness and unrest. This is countered with humour, which both artists have: »Slowly I am getting older and wiser, now I know that the end of the world, like a spoiled diva, keeps us waiting; because you see, we are still here and Switzerland is, too.«

For all those who have always shied away from the sheer length of the original Urs Widmer has carefully abridged the wonderful Tales From the Arabian Nights while preserving their oriental flavour. Highly vivid and amusing, he recounts the six most famous tales of the immortal Sheherazade: The Fisherman and the Jinni, Alibaba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, The Magic Horse, The Adventures of Haroun-al-Raschid, and Sinbad the Sailor.
As Hermann Hesse pointed out, the original of this great collection of fairytales is »a source of infinite pleasures and the most opulent picture book in the world«. To ensure that this holds true, Tatjana Hauptmann has richly illustrated this work, conveying Oriental lavishness and subtlety.

Its title is its programme. Widmer's columns and essays are about matters close to our hearts. What role does money play in our lives? How does work influence our self-definition? What are we afraid of? What makes us happy? The subjects of the texts range from everyday life to social problems. They describe the dissolution of the collective memory, the hysteria of our society, the catastrophic year 2001. They deal with immortality, with the first rapper Homer, and with the desire to think, just for a moment, with someone else's brain. It contains brilliant essays on ambivalent Nabokov heroes and Joseph Conrad's ›Heart of Darkness‹. And an outline of Helvetian history on the example of Gottfried Keller's ›Fähnlein der sieben Aufrechten‹.

On his twelfth birthday Karl receives a book of blank pages, which he proceeds to fill, day by day, throughout his life. But after his death the book disappears before his son, as tradition dictates, has had the chance to read it. So the son, as first-person narrator, retells the story: My Father's Book. This is the record of a rich existence, characterised by its love for life and passion for books. The fathers ability to inspire both himself and others is perhaps his most wonderful trait. Inwardly he lives in the world of Villon, Diderot and Stendhal whose work, along with that of many others, he translates while outwardly he feels himself drawn to of a group of young artists, all with distinct styles, but united in their burning antifascist beliefs. It comes as no surprise that he too, during a legendary carnival in 1936, becomes a communist. On his death in 1965, however, this allegiance is but a distant memory. My Father's Book is, inter alia, the story of the political aspirations and disappointments of the twentieth century. Of course, the book also tells the story of Clara, the woman he loves, the central figure in the novel My Mother's Lover. The same story, recounted from a startlingly new perspective.

Born in Ireland and living in Zurich, Mary is a beanpole with translucent skin, some freckles, blue eyes and blond hair. She has two admirers in Zurich: a writer and first-person narrator and his friend Helmut, letter writer and author as well. Yet she ends up with a service station attendant in distant Australia. It is here that she receives Helmut's ›Love Letter to Mary‹.

›Chinese Whispers‹ is the name of a children's game, played here with a literary text: It travels around the world and through six languages, and is compared with its original message at the end, with astonishing results. Ten prose pieces: A dream journey that is so suggestive you feel like you are there. A game played with creation myths. A first person narrator who voices the monstrous. An internal monologue between a man as his young and old self about the state of the world and his own personal stories. Legendary tales about gossipy old aunts and places where the author has been or wants to go to. About a century full of mortal agony. About encounters of longing at inopportune moments. And a book of nightmares about what people do to one another. Prose texts, poèmes en prose, poetic, mad, funny, dark, obsessive, yet always told with effortless ease by the inimitable voice of Urs Widmer.