Swiss cultural landscape, which constrains Swiss artists and writers and prevents them from producing anything of real artistic value. Controversially, Nizon argued that the only option for a Swiss artist is to escape to foreign lands. He points to many examples of writers, including Robert Walser, Friedrich Glauser and Albin Zollinger, who liberated themselves from the confines they experienced in their alpine homeland and sought to spread their wings abroad. 3 Indeed, the fact that Nizon himself settled in Paris shortly after publishing his essay and spent the rest of his life there can be seen as proof of the productivity of the Swiss writer on foreign soil. However, despite his similarity to other Swiss writers, it seems that in many respects, Lappert has created a unique text. It has been noted by many reviewers that Nach Hause schwimmen can be seen as a modern-day Bildungsroman, written in an era when writers no longer write Bildungsromane. 4 Its protagonist, Wilbur Sandberg, is an unlikely hero; as a man of unusually short stature, a gifted musician and a loner, Wilbur seems to be an exception on all fronts. Despite various attempts to belongin school, in his foster home, in a remand home, and later in the hotel for old men in New York-Wilbur inevitably stands out. He is an outsider who is both difficult to categorise and impossible to forget. The reader is left with the impression that