This is the confluence of the rivers Limmat and Sihl, in Zurich. During his wartime sojourns in Switzerland, James Joyce often took his ease in this pleasant spot. He was doing so one cold day in January 1941 when suddenly he doubled over in agony and went home in a taxi, to be ministered to by his wife Nora. Bed rest did him no good, however, so an ambulance, parp-parping through Zurich's silent nocturnal streets, rushed him to hospital. He was operated on for a perforated ulcer, improved, lapsed into a coma, woke up long enough to call for his wife and children, and lost consciousness again, this time for good. The Irish, still smothered by the Church, wouldn't take him, so he was buried in what we may well call--despite the hint of cliche--"his beloved" Zurich. Several decades later, in 1994, the oddball German-speaking Jewish Bulgarian Elias Canetti, notable in his writing for a total lack of humor--and for having won the Nobel Prize (never given to Joyce), on the strength of one novel--was buried nearby. I love Switzerland, but Joyce should be returned to Ireland, as Napoleon's remains were transferred from St. Helena to France in 1840. Canetti belongs there as much as anywhere. They can be heard, say the locals, quarreling on cold winter nights.
