Grotesque, exuberant, baroque: the author Gerold Späth has died
Keystone-SDA
The Swiss author Gerold Späth has died just two days before his 87th birthday. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in Swiss-German literature.
“With Gerold Späth, we have lost a great storyteller,” wrote Lenos Verlag on Thursday following the author’s death. The family had notified the publisher of Späth’ died’s passing on October 14.
Späth produced a literary masterpiece as early as 1970 with his debut novel Unschlecht. He established himself as an author whose books are characterised by “baroque opulence, a delight in language, crude humour and abysmal melancholy”. This is how Lenos Verlag put it.
Gerold Späth was born in 1939 into a dynasty of organ builders in Rapperswil on the upper Lake Zurich. In his works, he denounced the narrow-mindedness, self-righteousness and double standards of the idyllic Swiss world. He has been called a new Rabelais, a modern Grimmelshausen or a Swiss Boccaccio.
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Translated from German, reviewed by an English Department journalist.
