Chuckling out loud after only a few paragraphs, I had no doubt at all about why Dinah Lee Küng’s A Visit from Voltaire was on the list of potential Orange Prize winners in 2004. Her early chapters plunge us into a world that is so familiar; the world of the immigrant into the closed society of a small Swiss village. St Cergue is evoked with its railway snaking up through the village, its families who have lived there since the days of Voltaire and its traditional Vaudois ways of shutting out foreigners and all they stand for.

With the narrator, we struggle with the carpenter’s bills which consume all the family’s savings, the Swiss requirements that preclude the placing of an ‘island’ in the kitchen, the wildcats that nest in the roof insulation and the vagaries of the Swiss school system.

Poor, honest Alexander’s academic future is almost curtailed when he is the only child who doesn’t run away after the group of school children have accidentally set a stationary train in motion.

Into this wonderfully familiar world steps an uninvited guest who accompanies the narrator through most of the remainder of her first year in St Cergue. Husband, Peter, is busy with his Red Cross work but Voltaire compensates for his absence. Consuming litres of coffee and mastering the fax machine, the Internet and the telephone, Voltaire, a lively ghost, continues the literary and humanitarian work that occupied his lifetime two centuries earlier. We witness his hilarious response to the parent-teacher meeting and relive, with him, his rich libertine lifestyle.

The narrator’s own real involvement with modern political causes is interspersed with Voltaire’s narrative so that we touch on the unjustified imprisonment of Xu Wenli, the Chinese democracy activist and the human rights struggle for Dr Shaikh in Pakistan.

V is a whimsical and endearing companion who is an invaluable help to the narrator in her struggle to come to terms with her state as an emotional and cultural castaway in an alien environment. He teaches her how to live life to the fullest.  However, he is a demanding and expensive guest who ages as the narrative develops. He has to go. His initial departure leaves too many questions unresolved, but a delightful finale awaits the reader.

This novel is astonishingly rich in so many ways. The local area of the Geneva basin is evoked with St Cergue coming alive for us even to the 50 bends of the road up from the Geneva basin, and life in the UN and in the foreign community of Hong Kong. The author’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Voltaire’s life and works makes him a convincing figure in the 21st century as well as ‘La Lumière’ – the light of his own century.

A great read with a little more substance than most contemporary novels. Amazon have copies and Books Books Books too, so it is a good tip for Christmas reading.

Paddy Ashdown, A Fortunate Life

Ed. note: Paddy Ashdown is the guest speaker Tuesday 2 June at the Chateau de Prangins. The event is  sponsored by Executives International. Details, registration He will also be appearing Wednesday 1 July at a book signing at Off the Shelf in Geneva, followed by a presentation at an evening event sponsored by the British Swiss Chamber of Commerce at the Hotel Beau Rivage.

Paddy Ashdown, for eleven years leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third political party, has a special significance for Genevans. For years he was one of us, and his love of skiing, the Alps and nearby Savoie and Burgundy rings through his autobiography. He even has a French son-in-law and French grandchildren.

Paddy’s Bedford School reports claim that he had ‘no aptitude for languages’.  He modestly declares in a footnote that, when asked how many languages he speaks, he says he has forgotten six and is ‘nowadays only comfortable in French’. This from a man who has the equivalent of a first class honours degree in Chinese and who, in the course of a thrilling career, has functioned in Hindi, Malay, German, and what used to be called Serbo-Croat!

Such modesty is typical of the man we feel we know well from his political days. Many of us remember his years in Parliament, the initial triumph in the Yeovil seat and the growing strength of his party. We recall a scandal where he was hounded by the press. We sympathise with the failed ambition to partner Tony Blair in a move towards the proportional representation and constitutional reform that the UK’s third party would so warmly welcome. This section of Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon’s autobiography leaves us with a sense of  ’déja vu’ where we love Paddy for his honesty. In the current British political climate of corruption, it is refreshing to read of such political passion, defence of liberal ideas and devoted enthusiasm for a cause.

But this section of the autobiography (just over a third) pales in significance compared with the other parts: the accounts of Paddy’s school years, his leadership of a commando in Borneo, the Special Boat Service, time in Belfast, and his deeply emotional involvement with the cause of Bosnia Herzegovina.

Paddy admits, several times, that a privileged education has led him into his ‘fortunate life’, but Bedford was not easy. Gifted at sport but not keen on the academic aspects of school, he survived  early years of rough-and-tumble of a public school because of his ability to fight.

At 18, he chose the Royal Marines rather than a university. That is where the really exciting sections of the book begin. The descriptions of the jungle patrols of his commando are in such evocative prose that we feel as though we have shared the experiences – like the parachuting, and  nerve-wracking underwater entries and exits from a submarine during his Special Boat Service years.

The most moving element of the work is, undeniably, the involvement with the Balkan crisis. Lord Ashdown himself says in his prologue,

two of my Technicolor days, the best and the worst, fall consecutively in the second week of August 1992. Together they form not just a memory but also somehow a distillation of the theme of my life; that of conflict and its human consequences when the beast of intolerance and bigotry gets loose. Looking back, this seems like a subterranean stream which has appeared, vanished and re-emerged, never completely leaving me, since my earliest days.

He is speaking of his meeting with Radovan Karadzic and subsequent visit to  the brutal prison of Manjaca.

His description of Bosnia Herzegovina, where he spent nearly four years as the International High Representative and European Union Special Representative, is simply beautiful. We live with him and Jane, his wife, through four moving years there.

We leave this book feeling immense admiration for such a gentle and honest man who has given his life so generously for causes he truly believes in.

There is the light-hearted side too! A wealth of anecdotes enriches this autobiography and raises a smile on almost every page – like the wonderful one about a lecturer’s demonstration of how to survive – eat a live frog sandwich - or the description of coping with Balkan politics – ‘like herding cats’.

Paddy Ashdown’s autobiography, A Fortunate Life, can be obtained in Geneva from the English Bookshop, Off the Shelf.

The death of a child is the worst nightmare for most mothers. Oscar has cancer. He has very few days to live and knows it, but his parents are unable to face the truth and share their grief with him. The elderly hospital visitor, the lady in pink helps Oscar come to terms with his death.

The lady in pink suggests that Oscar  should write a letter to God each night. Each letter will represent a decade, so that we find Oscar at the age of 110, exclaiming with delight that he is older than his parents now. The letters are a lovely way of coming to terms with harsh reality.

The lady in pink has the very touching final words on the morning Oscar dies.

Oscar and the Lady in Pink, translated from Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s original novel in French, is a world best-seller – understandably! It fits into the category of ’self-help’ without being patronising or mawkish.

There are copies in the outstanding selection of books in English at the La Combe Migros store in Nyon. What a surprise to find such well-chosen novels, best-selling crime-fiction and factual books at prices that are approachable.

The graffiti on the Swiss motorways and railways sends me into a rant. I’d like the perpetrators to be obliged to clean a whole section – say a kilometre or two. I am sure that would cure them of their anti-social habit.

There’s cognitive dissonance at play here since I am delighted by the work of Banksy. Banksy Wall and Piece is a joyful romp through Banksy’s work that has appeared mysteriously overnight in public places. Take a look at the Banksy rat!

I rather like the quotation on the dust jacket of Wall and Piece; "There’s no way you’re going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover" (Metropolitan Police spokesperson).

I am not alone in my ambiguous attitude to graffiti since Banksy’s Kate Moss series has just netted a record price at Sotheby’s.