A woman arrives in Geneva, the first stop in a train journey through the country of her father’s birth. She yearns to be outside time, untethered and alone but she soon becomes immersed in the stories resonating all around her. She visits a museum and stares into the oversized, disco-ball eyes of an insect, unsettled by the intimacy, ‘like looking into the facial pores of a lover’. Later, she will tiptoe through the snow to find a portrait of James Baldwin on the window shutter of a chalet, his features rendered in rows of silver staples shot into timber. She will find traces of Mary Shelley and Fleur Jaeggy; android pioneers in eighteenth-century Neuchatel; Charlie Chaplin, Patricia Highsmith, and striking workers drilling through the earth to create the vast Gotthard Tunnel; Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary as they summit Everest; Lenin and the Dada artists in early twentieth-century Zurich.
