Archive of Love

»I loved him. He was the great love of my life…«
With these words an old lady introduces herself to the author who has just arrived to attend a reading. It is November, All Saints’ Day, and even traveling to the reading through the valley of his childhood has reawakened memories in him.

And now he is confronted with this unknown woman, Anna Altmann, who claims to have been his father's lover many years ago. She hands him a photograph and her telephone number. The meeting leaves him perplexed, he does not ring back, stubbornly banishing the thought from his mind – until, one day, he receives news of the death of Anna Altmann. The letter is from her daughter Vera, asking him to pick up a few things: photos, letters, tokens of love that Anna had kept for all those years, testimonies to the love between Anna and his father; Vera calls it the "archive", the "archive of love".
He begins, initially with great reluctance and then with growing fascination, and together with Vera investigates the past and synchronizes his memories of the summer of 1954, when his father disappeared for several months, with those of Vera.

In his concise, precise, light style, Urs Faes tells of things past, of a great love preserved in small things – and of a hunt for clues that ends in an extraordinary discovery: the story of a father about whom some people had had an idea but whom nobody really knew.