Big Swiss
A Novel
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3.9 • 22 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER AND CULT FAVORITE
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, Time, NPR, Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Huffington Post, NBC News, Lit Hub, theSkimm, Condé Nast Traveler, Town & Country, and more!
“One of the funniest books of the last few years” (Los Angeles Times) about a sex therapist’s transcriptionist and her affair with one of the patients.
Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss.
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…
“A fantastic, weird-as-hell, super funny novel” (Bustle), Big Swiss is both a love story and a deft examination of infidelity, mental health, sexual stereotypes, and more—from an amazingly talented, singular voice in contemporary fiction.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Love is strange, messy, and extremely European in Jen Beagin’s slightly absurdist novel. Greta is a middle-aged transcriptionist in Hudson, New York who works for a second-rate sex therapist. As she listens to the anonymous audio recordings of his sessions, she finds herself bewitched by one woman—who has an austere attitude and a slight accent—and dubs her Big Swiss. Beagin’s plainspoken writing style makes it easy to dive into Greta’s off-kilter point of view. Pretty much everything in Greta’s orbit is untenable, from her transient lifestyle to her bee-infested house to Big Swiss’ denial of her own emotional trauma, and that definitely feels like the point. The more we learn about Greta, the more her bizarre world makes sense. This oddball character study really stuck with us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beagin (Vacuum in the Dark) delivers a delightfully off-kilter romantic comedy set in a Hudson Valley increasingly transformed by transplants from New York City. The protagonist, Greta, is in her 40s, living in a semi-derelict Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, N.Y., with her beloved dog, Piñón. Greta is working as a transcriptionist for a local sex therapist named Om when she is captivated by the voice of one of Om's patients, a 30-something married woman whom she nicknames Big Swiss for her height and nationality, who used to live in Brooklyn. At the dog park, Greta and Big Swiss (whose real name is Flavia) meet by chance, and romance between the two blossoms, complicated by the fact that Greta is privy to Big Swiss's most private inner thoughts. While the interpersonal intrigue is palpable, this is also very much a novel about place, full of alternately snide and affectionate commentary about the rapidly gentrifying town. When encountering another of the therapist's patients and his wife at a coffee shop, Greta notes, "like most people in Hudson, they were better looking than average and dressed like boutique farmers." Beagin is a gifted storyteller with a flair for the eccentric and a soft spot for a wayward soul. This unconventional love story has a surplus of appeal from page one.
