Do you know this feeling? Sometimes you just want to get out of life. Best-selling author Clara Maria Bagus (47) touches the nerves of the era with her new novel “The Voice of the Light”: her book is about different people, all of whom want to disappear from their lives. “You can’t take it any longer. This has to work, this daily struggle, and the feeling that everyone is being pulled towards you, until at some point you don’t know where the other person ends and you begin,” she writes.
For Bagus, a feeling he knows all too well: “The world has become more tiring. Loud, fast, loud. You should always be in good mood and function.” Nobody has time to stop: “We are like rats in the wheel of life. We run faster, the wheel spins faster until we get out.”
self-improvement pressure
Everyone is under pressure to optimize themselves. “Some people are hard enough to exist,” he says. It is precisely these people that Bagus wants to give voice to in his book. Quiet, cunning, struck by fate. He wants to shed light on everyone who is in the shadow of society or outside. “Mental fatigue and even mental illness still gets a lot of condemnation. The latter is usually nothing more than a metabolic disorder in the brain. “There’s a lot more understanding for physical suffering,” says the psychologist who has worked in brain research for a long time.
And Bagus knows better than most that destiny can happen to anyone. He grew up with a mentally disabled sister, and his mother died of leukemia at an early age. She nearly died in a car accident as a young woman. A drunk crashed into his car at 160 km/h. “It’s a miracle I survived,” she says. “I was physically shattered.”
He remains grateful and humble. Because in addition to all the blows of fate, life also gave him rich gifts. With her husband and twin boys and the fact that she was allowed to live in a beautiful and privileged country like Switzerland.
make peace with death
Bagus is married to bestselling author Rolf Dobelli (56), although he deliberately writes under his mother’s maiden name Clara Maria Bagus to avoid being referred to as “Frau von”. The couple has eight-year-old twin boys. “From the outside, you might think everything is perfect here.” But fate does not spare him. One of the twin boys was diagnosed with highly aggressive lymph node cancer in 2020. After a year of chemotherapy, the family could breathe a sigh of relief: “Death saved our son from his fingertips at the last moment, and for that I am incredibly grateful. It would break me if one of my children died.”
Bagus pays special attention to death in his new novel: he is the narrator. “I befriended him, for me he is a lovely man you would want to have a glass of wine with.” It allows us to take our fear of death and welcome it lovingly. He knocks on the door, but when the time comes, he leaves. For Bagus, writing is a kind of literary packaged antidepressant: “With one book, I can reach many more people than in a single therapy session.” Its purpose is to provide comfort and hope. And no matter how dramatic his books start, he rewards the reader in the end. “Although life can feel like the end of everything sometimes, trust yourself: Sometimes a star falls from the sky and it fixes everything.”
«The Voice of Light»: A Novel of Disappearance and Finding Oneself, by Clara Maria Bagus, Piper.
Philosopher Rolf Dobelli on Goodwill