Bern, books, and by-the-way
Reading WHISTLER
In my January 2024 blog post, I called Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake (2023) “a joyful novel” and included it in a list of my favorite books for 2024. This weekend I’ve just finished Patchett’s Whistler (2026), another novel that introduces us to loving and lovable characters working to resolve questions about their pasts that I…
The Battle of Murten or Kim’s 550-Year-Old Fake News
Murten (Morat in French) is a German- and French-speaking Swiss community of around 10,000 in the canton of Fribourg. It perches above a small lake and boasts a walled medieval Old Town complete with a castle and a fifteenth-century church. It’s a good place to take out-of-town guests, not only because it’s beautiful, but also…
A Small Defeat for Toxic Nationalism
You may have noticed that Switzerland has been in the international news recently. Last Sunday, on June 14, 55% of Swiss voters rejected a proposal to cap the country’s population at 10 million by 2050. Right now, the country has a little over nine million people. If the Swiss had said yes to the proposal,…
My Swiss Washday
Soon after I moved to Bern in 1988 as the young wife of a Swiss man, I met a delightful American woman named Margaret, who had been the young wife of a Swiss man in the 1930s. She’d married a farmer, and when we spoke, she was still living in a Bernese farmhouse. I was…
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Kim Hays 