Gabrielle's Reviews > Big Swiss

I have seen other reviewers mention this, and I can’t help but chime in: this cover art is very off-putting. I have no idea if that woman is in the throes of ecstasy, in shock, chocking or in pain (or all of the above!) but silly as that may sound, it was almost enough to make me not read the book. Yes, yes: I know what they say about books and their covers. I also know that we nevertheless CONSTANTLY judge books by their covers, and this one is weird. But I had gotten morbidly curious about “Big Swiss”, and that was the edition they had at Lift Bridge Book Store, so, yeah… here we are.

Following in the footsteps of the divisive Ottessa Moshfegh, this is a book about a woman losing her mind in a very bizarre way. Greta is a recently separated middle-aged woman who lives in her friend’s ramshackle and bee-infested farmhouse in the Hudson River valley and supports herself by transcribing an eccentric sex therapist’s sessions. She develops a crush on one of the patients’ whose sessions she had been listening to, a younger married woman she nicknames Big Swiss (her real name is Flavia) – and eventually meets her in real life, something that seems inevitable in such a small town. Greta recognizes her voice immediately and uses the info she has gathered listening to Big Swiss’ sessions to get closer and eventually start an affair with her. Big Swiss is, of course, unaware that Greta knows all these intimate details about her life and her past. Will she find out? Will Greta’s insanity ruin the relationship first?

So is this a book where the cover is its own warning? Is the content as off-putting as that cover portrait of female experiencing… something (I ended up looking it up, and the cover is from a painting called “Falling Woman” by Canadian artist Anna Weyant)? I think that my experience of reading this book was not all that different from how I felt reading “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”: I stayed out of curiosity but my enjoyment of the story and characters oscillated back and forth between laughing out loud and rolling my eyes enough to give myself a migraine. Om is not that far from Dr. Tuttle in the sense he is an absolute quack, and his session transcript are equal parts hilarious and horrific. Greta does not have Moshfegh’s nameless protagonist’s excuse of youth to explain her curious lack of introspection, but she is equally damaged and oblivious. Again, not unlike my experience with Moshfegh, I found myself wondering if that was a point to the cringe or if the cringe IS the point? Listen, I know that many of us do not have our shit together nearly as much as we would like, and that truth often has a way of being stranger than fiction – and sometimes, it’s refreshing to see that on the page, the weirdness and confusion we really have to deal with on a daily basis. But if there was a greater idea here, I'm afraid I missed it.

I noticed that the reviews for this book are mostly a love it or hate it situation, and I confess I am dismayed at falling into neither camp. It’s really just an OK book: it’s not badly written, but the prose isn’t especially remarkable, the story and characters are interesting and the ideas wild, but nowhere near as shocking as I was led to expect, and the end is very anti-climactic. So 3 stars it is.


On a personal note, I came across a few reviews that were like ‘finally a book that’s not about a millennial complaining!’ and I just want to say that, for the record, the older millennials are now in their 40s, myself included. So, sure, Greta is a bit older than the average millennial, but not by that much... Millennials are no longer the young kids some people (Greta included: she really fucking hates them, despite being obsessed with one) still seem to think we are – the youngest ones are about to turn 30! Plenty of us have arthritis and are experiencing perimenopause – along with a wide range of other very adult problems; and I for one I’m looking forward to the day where my status as a grown-up will be accepted in spite of the generation I belong to because it’s getting old, pun intended. Thanks for listening to my geriatric millennial rant/nitpicking.