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  • James Joyce in Zurich: A Guide by Andreas Fischer
  • Amanda Sigler (bio)
JAMES JOYCE IN ZURICH: A GUIDE, by Andreas Fischer. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xv + 302 pp. €74.89 cloth.

While on a stroll with Frank Budgen, Joyce announced his ambitions for Ulysses: "I want . . . to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."1 Significantly, Joyce made this assertion while walking in Zurich, and this neutral Swiss city, which provided a home for Joyce during two world wars and formed his final resting place, is the focal point of Andreas Fischer's new book. Just as Joyce evoked the historic Dublin of his youth, so Fischer reconstructs the city of Zurich as it was in Joyce's lifetime. But whereas Joyce aimed to be compendious and was tempted into writing ever longer episodes as Ulysses progressed, Fischer's guide is built on a model of Swiss efficiency and consistency, with the average chapter running about three to four pages. These chapters provide quick snapshots of Zurich and its inhabitants as they collectively create a holistic image of Joyce's Swiss home.

Although Zurich has long been a hub for Joycean gatherings, Joyce's other cities—Dublin, Trieste, and Paris—have received considerably more scholarly attention, with entire books being devoted to their role in Joyce's life and works.2 Fischer's guide aims to correct that oversight. He points out that other works have been written on Joyce's Zurich—there is Thomas Faerber and Markus [End Page 537] Luchsinger's German-language Joyce in Zürich,3 but Fischer's is the first book-length study in the English language. The book's organization, built on simple and "no-nonsense" principles (4), is underlaid by significant archival research. As Emeritus Professor of English Philology at the University of Zurich, Fischer has been well positioned to draw upon local resources. The guide brings together rich evidence from the photo archive of the Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich (which holds the city's records of historic buildings), the archive of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (one of the city's newspapers), the Zentralbibliothek (Zurich's central library), and the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, among other repositories. The guide can be read cover to cover or piecemeal and selectively, like an encyclopedia.

This versatile book is sensibly arranged into three main parts: Part I gives an overview of the project; it includes the Introduction as well as short chapters covering "Joyce in Zurich," "Zurich in Joyce," and "Zurich after Joyce." Part II contains the more vital information of the book, with sixty individual, encyclopedia-style articles on people, places, and artifacts associated with Joyce's Zurich. Part III contains two appendices: (1) a brief timeline of Joyce in Switzerland, based mostly on Roger Norburn's Chronology,4 and (2) a map of Joyce's Zurich, which is regrettably too miniscule to be of much use. There is also a bibliography and an index. The guide, especially Part II, is akin to A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie's James Joyce A to Z, except with a focus on Switzerland.5 There is one other notable distinction: whereas Fargnoli and Gillespie's book includes encyclopedia-style entries for fictional characters, Fischer's guide limits its purview to facts and history. Thus one should expect an entry for Martha Fleischmann but not for Martha Clifford (although the parallel is mentioned under the Fleischmann entry).

In addition to Fleischmann, the usual suspects include Henry Carr, Claud Sykes, and the English Players (each receiving a separate entry), Budgen, Carl Jung, Alfred Vogt, Carola Giedion-Welcker, and Ottocaro Weiss, among others. Those who, like me, have done research at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation will be drawn to entries for familiar places such as Bahnhofstrasse (still the main street), Bellevue (by the lake), Kronenhalle (still a grand restaurant that young scholars have fantasies of patronizing), and the Café Odeon (server of rich hot cocoa in my memory and center of "concentrated and steaming" opinions in Stefan Zweig's memory6). The...

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