In "Lauzanne," Mathias Howald Spells Out a Father's Silence

Mathias Howald's "Lauzanne" is published by Paulette éditrice, a Lausanne house marking its tenth anniversary this year, according to Le Temps. The author read from the book alongside five other Paulette writers at a public event in Lausanne on September 18.

The book, placed under the sign of Georges Perec and of Scrabble, is Howald's remembrance of his father, who introduced him to both the writer and the game. Its fourteen brief chapters take their titles from the words his father placed on the board during what turned out to be his final game — from "polje" to "ta." According to Le Temps, this is no mere formal exercise: the book is slim but dense, and each word carries its full weight, including its ambiguity. Howald notes that the English verb "to scrabble" also means to scratch, to scrape, to struggle or fight with claws or hands.

Le Temps describes a relationship marked by reticence, in which the family library and the Scrabble board were spaces the father and son could inhabit silently together. At the game, the father impressed his son with the breadth of his vocabulary and the quickness of his mind. Howald writes that he cannot say whether his father "was a happy man," but that he has, over time, learned to content himself with his father's incomplete explanations and his rare expressions of feeling.

The father was a civil engineer — in a country proud of its dams and tunnels — who might, Howald suggests, have become a writer instead. Le Temps frames him as a man standing behind a "dam of silence," moving through interior galleries of unfathomable depth.