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Why did my father always buy houses in such places, hoping for some connection to a society that would never otherwise have welcomed him? I was fond of recalling that château on Lake Geneva in which he died, a somewhat abashed variation on the Rothschilds’ Château de Pregny. I could picture the fad…

In Switzerland one has the right to die, she had always said, and that’s what the doctors kept telling me as well. Even the clinic’s ethics committee told me that, advising that I give consent for them to cease further treatment, to just turn the plastic valve of the morphine tube up a little, beca…

Sometimes, often, I’d told myself that it wouldn’t have been an indication of mental health to be able to adapt to such a deeply disturbed family. And how I had ever succeeded, how it’d even been possible to succeed in extricating myself from these unfathomable abysses and becoming a halfway normal…

So, instead of returning straight to my hotel in the Old Town, I did in fact go to the bar in Kronenhalle, where the door always did exactly the opposite of what one expected. If you wanted to pull it, it could be opened only with a push, and vice versa. I took my seat there in the back, down at th…

My mother’s situation—and now I’ll get to the point—often forced me to visit Zurich, this city of posers and braggarts and debasement, and had completely paralyzed me for years. It had become vile, altogether heinous, it had become more than I was able to bear, than one should have to bear. My moth…