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Switzerland may be a conservative country in many ways, but one would never know it by reading some of the younger, nontraditional novelists of the last few decades. Peter Weber is a "freshman" among writers but by no means a "greenhorn." His maiden voyage into the land of literature is an unconventional, briskly told novel of fine promise and intensity, but difficult to assimilate, even more difficult to review, and next to impossible to translate into English, should it ever come to that.
Der Wettermacher is the story--if one can speak of a story in this free fall of associations--of August Abraham Abderhalden, his parents and brother, and his native soil of Toggenburg in the canton of St. Gallen. On his twentieth birthday, 1 April 1990,...