The Frog in the Throat

A bracing and darkly comic novel about a disgraced priest who finds himself haunted by his dead and disapproving father, this little-known classic of Swiss literature is impossible to forget. In a small town in Switzerland, a man named Franz-ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends-is being haunted, or harried is more like it, by his father, Klement, recently deceased.

In life, after Franz was caught cheating on his wife and forthwith defrocked, Klement called him a disgrace and never spoke to him again; in death, Klement comes to visit him once a month in the form of a frog in the throat. Part of Franz is urbane and self-aware (unfazed to find himself unfaithful in every sense), but another is inhabited by the voice of this father, a socialist dairy farmer devoted to the old ways, forever railing against his son and the whole modern mess he represents.