Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

TERMINUS (EXCERPTS) BY ODILE CORNUZ TRANSLATED BY TESS LEWIS

Author’s note:

Terminus: a word that invokes finality, a sense of ending, bereavement, the more or less fortunate conclusion of something. That ’s just it: the desire to go see—in the city’s remote corners where necks are craned and hopes twisted, where one feels exposed under the gaze of others. The desire to capture intimate moments of life, tragic or ridiculous. A kind of chronicle of my days and of the lives I brush up against without knowing them, lives that call to me to be recreated as fiction. Voices that speak to me in confidence, as many of my characters support me and reassure me as make me fear the world. Virginia Woolf claimed it was the writer ’s duty to live in the presence of reality in order to find it, collect it, and communicate it to others. I consider these texts to be little bits of reality I offer to others. I’d like them to find resonance on the other side of the looking glass.

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