The Secret Child

Jean-Michel Olivier's L'Enfant secret won the Swiss Prix Dentan. In her introduction to this edition, Clorinda Donato calls it “a profoundly personal exploration of those secrets we all inherit almost as part of our DNA”: the hidden deeds of ancestors we glimpse only through “the inadvertent confession of a distant cousin or a box of photos suddenly unearthed.”

The narrator traces two sets of grandparents: Julien and Emilie in the villages of Vaud, and Antonio and Nora in Trieste as the city passed from Austrian to Italian rule. James and Nora Joyce, Ezra Pound and Vladimir Nabokov make brief appearances. At the centre is his maternal grandfather, born Anton Buchacher, who remade himself as the photographer Antonio Campofaggi and whose images helped turn Benito Mussolini into Il Duce.

Laurence Moscato's translation keeps the distance between Swiss French and the French of France, the distance that, as Donato writes, “makes the text Swiss.”