"Schwyz. Uri. Unterwalden." is a book-length contemporary essay whose spare fragments transcend the conventions of regional literature as it invites the reader to witness a world both familiar and unexpected. The narrator, a foreigner to Switzerland, performs 21 walking trips through the founding cantons of the country in order to encounter the landscapes hidden beneath the common clichés. With each discovery of a canton, the others are cast in a new light, each chapter remapping the meanings of a mountain, a meadow, a patch of snow. Through extracts of moment by moment experience, the text becomes a self-documentary exploration which traces the contours of belonging and the insufficiency of borders which stay in one place.
