New novel tells the memoirs of a chair fetishist

Jürg Beeler’s novel “The Tenderness of Chairs” suggests that it can be more satisfying to love chairs than people.

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Jürg Beeler, who was born in Zurich in 1957, has published six novels since 1996, and there was always talk of love. But what he now has the protagonists of his latest novel do is a claim that is almost programmed to fail.

Matteo grew up in Romansh in Graubünden and learned “a mushy Schwyzerdütsch and a cracked High German” in the Disentis monastery. He was a celebrity actor until a memory failure left him unable to work. In the end he retreats to the Italian town of Lerone and finally to the legendary French “book village” of Montolieu. And when the pandemic forces the 77-year-old to isolate himself, he writes a book “about love par excellence”, with which he wants to memorialize his former partner, the Polish harpsichordist Zofia Wandowska.

It started with a slap in the face

However, neither the said Zofia nor a second lover, the Canadian composer Vera Dumézil, correspond to any ideal. And Matteo himself is not a gifted lover. He says himself that he is “not made for women”, physical contact with the opposite sex obviously disgusts him and he develops a more tender inclination towards objects such as chairs or the cistern over the toilet than he is able to towards people .

The 15 years with the aloof, reserved Zofia began with a slap in the face and ended with the terminally ill woman urging him out of the hospital room – after all, as he later recalled, she wanted “in the desperate hope of defeating cancer, everything lazy, so also me, blot out of their lives».

However, the memory failure that ended his stage career seems to have been more than a one-off attack, as Matteo no longer remembers it when he met the much more sensual Vera, with whom he fell in love after Zofia’s death, her decades ago to have met in Paris. The sweetheart’s hour on the lawn in front of the Tuileries was not without consequences.

In any case, the farewell letter that the creator of a “Requiem for the Sea” wrote to him after a kind of honeymoon on the Greek island that she had chosen for her suicide in the crater of a volcano made him fall from all clouds. So Vera made him the father of a daughter without his knowledge – “It seemed like a miracle to me that it was so easy to let a stranger get you pregnant” – and it was also completely new for him that Zofia did so for a while Vera’s mistress was.

So it is only understandable that the multiple cuckold ascribes the impulse for his love book in the end neither to the unfaithful Zofia nor to the unfaithful Vera, but to his daughter Elisa, whom he never saw and who died at the age of five.

A book «about love par excellence»? At most, if you take the first sentences from “King Lear”, with which Matteo has repeatedly caused a sensation on stage, at face value: “Every beginning demands a sequel, every love after its bloody end.”