Suzette Meyer, Canadian writer: “When I write, I can fly”

Looking from one end of the bookstore to the other on Tuesday evening, it looked almost like a full train carriage. Many book lovers attended the reading, along with Canadian author Suzette Meyer, but also Canadian Ambassador Patrick Whitman, his colleague Stephen Chartrand (Cultural Affairs), Jakob Signer and the head of the Office of Culture, Rebecca Doric. Political and diplomatic delegations gave greetings.

Everyone was delighted that Appenzell was a stop on Suzette Mayr's European tour. His sixth novel, “The Sleeping Car Servant”, published in German in 2023, became a bestseller in Appenzell Bookstore in Switzerland due to booksellers' recommendations. Suzette Meyer traveled from Calgary, the world's second largest country of 37 million people, to a small province in Switzerland with a population of 16,400.

The Canadian ambassador praised the value of novels like “The Sleeping Car Servant” which also depicted injustice in Canadian history. “I think art is a great way to promote awareness and diversity.” Marcy Goldberg, a Canadian film historian living in Switzerland, had a wonderful and enlightening – bilingual – conversation with the author. Attentive viewers learned her family history, how she became a writer, where the magical realism of her storytelling comes from, and where her fascination with the human body and the processes that take place within it comes from. It is one of the most common texts by Suzette Mayr's first novel available in Germany. “The beauty of writing is that there are no rules: I can fly, I can travel to other spheres,” he said.

Actress Anna-Katharina Diener recited two paragraphs of the “historical novel” on which the author worked for 20 years, and even those who have already read the book want to read it again. Anyone who still wants to read it will have to be patient: “The Sleeping Car Servant” is out of stock in German translation; It will be available in paperback in the fall. Still, the queue at the autograph table was long.