‘Schlemm’ by Nicola Bardola

Paul and Franca Salamun, who live in the alpine Swiss canton of Graubünden, have been married for decades when Paul falls ill with bladder cancer. A former mathematician and Bridge master, the 75-year-old has spent most of his life calculating the probability of certain outcomes in specific situations. He has also thoroughly considered his options regarding his illness: not only does he refuse life-prolonging surgery, but he decides to die with the help of a Swiss assisted suicide organisation, in order to avoid the complications to be expected after the diagnosis, such as fever and pain, as well as cognitive impairment caused by the use of morphine. In Paul's decision-making, literature is of great significance—both fictional and philosophical discourse on suicide and death— as numerous relevant intertextual passages (by, among others, Seneca, Michel de Montaigne, Peter Noll, Franz Werfel, and Jean Améry) reveal. Paul's wife Franca decides to die with him. The 71-year-old is not seriously ill herself. In addition to some age-related complaints and an unexplained abdominal illness, she is, above all, tired of life and wants to forestall her physical and mental decline. Long before Paul’s illness, the couple had planned to die together one day, to avoid ending their lives in a hospital or nursing home and to escape the existential suffering that the loss of one of them would mean for the other. Their assisted death becomes a touchstone for their son Luca, who, as the novel’s protagonist, tries to come to terms with it emotionally.

In this autofictional novel, the Swiss author Bardola processes the real joint suicide of his parents with the help of the assisted suicide organisation ‘EXIT Deutsche Schweiz’. The effects of the parental death on the character of the son Luca are therefore also the focus of the novel. Narratologically, it is laid out in such a way that two readings are possible: First, a multi-perspective narrative in which the events are told mainly from the point of view of son Luca and father Paul, with a few passages from the perspectives of Franca and other characters. In this way, Paul's decision to commit assisted suicide is presented as a rationally justified rejection of prolonging life at any price. The joint suicide with his wife, who is not seriously ill but suffers existentially from the prospect of being left alone, appears to be an understandable step that enables both of them, who have long been vehemently opposed to ending their lives in a care facility, to die together in their own home in what they consider to be a dignified and even cheerful and romantic manner. Without fundamentally questioning this reading, however, the novel also offers a reading in which there is no actual change of perspective, but all events are perceived and narrated from Luca’s consciousness as he tries to come to terms with their deaths, notably his pain and feelings of guilt, thereby glossing over certain problematic aspects of their marriage and their dying. Both readings are equally plausible, and the novel thus highlights the tensions between reason and emotion, between the individual's right to a ‘self-determined death’ and its consequences for the bereaved. The novel was met with a great media response, especially in Germany, where assisted suicide was not yet, at the time, regulated by law, but unlike in Switzerland was de facto hardly accessible. The author, who has also written a non-fiction book on assisted suicide (Der begleitete Freitod, 2007), was repeatedly asked about the topic in interviews, talk shows and panel discussions and made a clear plea in favour of liberal legislation in Germany.