Christian Haller has been awarded the 2023 Swiss Book Prize for his novel, "Sich lichtende Nebel" (Clearing the fog). The prize was awarded on Sunday in the foyer of the Basel Theatre as part of the Buch Basel (Basel book) literary festival.
Christian Haller’s novel Sich lichtende Nebel tells the story about the protagonist, Werner Heisenberg, and a physical problem that when solved, leads to the uncertainty principle which is later named after him.
In the spring of 1925 in Copenhagen, a man observes how another man walks through the stream of light from a lantern at night and then disappears into the darkness and reappears in the next stream of light. He immediately forgets this observation until it comes back to him weeks later and helps him to find a solution to a physical problem.
The man in the light is Helstedt, a retired historian and the authors creation. Helstedt occasionally experiences worrying states in which he perceives himself and his environment as pure, shimmering energy.
The novel alternates between Heisenberg and Helstedt and uses them characters to demonstrate how blurred our perception of the world really is. The physics problem is vividly visualised. Haller cancels out one character with the other which testifies to his dual fascination with scientific observation and literary writing.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that an observed object is changed by the observation itself, i.e. that objectivity is not possible. Literature and physics are rarely as close as they are in this novel. Christian Haller captures this closeness in an extremely appealing and clever way.
The jury emphasised the “clarity, beauty and simplicity” of the story Sich lichtende Nebel. The 80-year-old Haller’s work beat off competition from his younger colleague Sarah Elena Müller and his equally younger fellow nominees Demian Lienhard, Matthias Zschokke and Adam Schwarz.
The Swiss Book Prize was established in 2008 and is awarded exclusively to German-language Swiss literature. The first prize winner is awarded CHF30,000 ($3,3868). Previous prize winners include Kim de l’Horizon, with the novel Blutbuch (Blood Book) in 2022, Martina Clavadetscher, Die Erfindung des Ungehorsams (The Invention of Disobedience) in 2021, and Anna Stern, das alles hier, jetzt (all this here, now) in 2022.
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