Lukas Bärfuss on his mother  In the Shadow of the Queen

Lukas Bärfuss’s new book initially centres on his unloving mother, who gave birth to her son but never wanted him. By the end, it becomes a sweeping indictment of the Western capitalist society in which she was forced to live.

In his books, Lukas Bärfuss frequently grapples with the past, both his own and that of his country. In Vaters Kiste (Father’s Box, 2022), he intertwines the life story of his father, a homeless petty criminal, with a “story about inheritance” and critical reflections on the capitalist notion of private property. Now, with Königin der Nacht (Queen of the Night), the Swiss author has written “a short book about my mother”. As in his previous work, he combines personal experiences with social critique.

He picks up precisely where the book about his father ends, beginning with the death of his mother, who leaves her son behind with a pink bank statement: The book is divided into three parts. In the first, the narrator reflects on his mother’s excessive way of life; the second deals with the consequences of her behaviour for his childhood. “Childhood is a dark sleep illuminated by dreams,” he writes. In the final, more essayistic section, Bärfuss places his mother’s fate within the broader context of Swiss history and society.

Nothing Is Easy

On the face of it, the son has succeeded. He has escaped his social background; his life could be told as a success story, as the story of someone who has climbed the social ladder. He has become an admired and award-winning writer. Yet: “All of that is false. In truth, he is stupid. And blind. And stingy. He could have helped. He should have helped. It would have been easy.”

But nothing is easy, neither in the son’s life nor in that of the mother, who comes from the community of the itinerant Yenish people. The son’s relationship with his mother is one of constant conflict. After work at the car dealership, she transforms in his eyes into a “Queen of the Night”, whose beauty he admires as a child. Later, however, he calls her his “black sun”, or crudely, a “slut” with a “bony, resilient body”, living in the “orbit of prostitution and illegal dealings”. During the fifteen years before her death, he has no contact with her. This mother-son relationship is irreparably damaged. And that is entirely understandable, given that she neglected him during his childhood, placed him as a “Verdingbub” (indentured child laborer, see Verdingkinder) with a farming family, and turned him out onto the streets at the age of fifteen:

Escape to the Caribbean

Yet Bärfuss does not stop at describing the absence of a relationship with his mother. Instead, he seeks to understand her actions. In doing so, he portrays her as a victim and examines the kind of society in which all of this took place. She is a single mother who is marginalised and, as a result, marginalises others herself. She does not want to be a mother; she wants to be free. Since her pension in Switzerland is insufficient to live on, she emigrates to the Dominican Republic with a new partner.

War Against the Poor

Bärfuss is well known for his strained relationship with his homeland, Switzerland. In this book, too, he does not hold back with his fundamental criticism: “How does a country become the richest in the world? Through hard work, dirty business, and war against the poor within its own borders.” For generations, he argues, Switzerland has waged a “campaign against the itinerant people” as a “genocidal project”.

Bärfuss’s book, as radically honest as it is sensitive, is a continuous act of self-examination. Particularly in the final section, the author weaves essayistic passages and socially critical reflections into the narrative. And even if the angry, accusatory answers he offers, when the personal spills over into the political, can at times feel somewhat definitive and exclusionary, the book’s high literary quality repeatedly opens it up again, offering a way out into the open.

August 2026