I went to the Alps in August because my son — a New York City third grader obsessed with baseball, projectiles and YouTube — fell in love this summer with the Swiss children’s novel “Heidi.”
OK, we were going to Switzerland anyway to visit his aunt and uncle in Geneva. And I was the one who introduced my son, R, to the novel, after Googling “kids books switzerland” one night before our trip. But I never expected it to be a hit. I certainly didn’t expect to find myself weeks later in an Alpine enclave called Heidiland, wandering with my 8-year-old superfan through the knot of trails and villages that inspired the story.
“Heidi,” published in 1881 by Johanna Spyri, is the three-toed sloth of children’s books; it moves so slowly, with such little action, that whole ecosystems could flourish undisturbed between its pages. The titular character is an orphan who lives with her misanthropic grandfather and their goats in the Swiss Alps. At 8, Heidi goes to a big foreign city (Frankfurt) to stay with her wheelchair-using cousin, Clara, but grows restless and returns to the mountains. There, through Heidi’s ministrations, her grandfather finds God and re-enters society.
I started reading my son a free online version at bedtime, mostly for its lovely descriptions of the Swiss landscape. I figured he’d tolerate five minutes, tops. Instead, R made me keep reading until my throat was raw. By week’s end, he had acquired a library copy and was poring over it each night in the tiny oblong glow of his bedside LED.
I was thrilled, of course, but baffled. R was no bookworm; until recently, he’d struggled with reading. And I couldn’t work out how a boy who thrived on armed combat and poop jokes had fallen so hard for a tale of pastoral youth and spiritual transformation. It felt almost like spite.
Like many parents, I have tried to pass on the highlights of my early reading life to my children (R and his little sister). And, like many parents, I have been crushed when the box sets of serial mysteries and Beverly Cleary paperbacks I buy with aching affection remain untouched. Children are not miniature versions of yourself. They do not like what you like, or what you think they will like. No matter how many times this has been demonstrated to me over the years, I’m always pancaked when the reminder comes.
“He’s reading,” my wife said. “Leave him alone.”
I found out about Heidiland just before our trip. It was near Switzerland’s eastern border — more than four hours by train from Geneva. But I knew instantly that my son would want to go. And I was curious, too. R had given me nothing but the classic juvenile shrug when I asked him why he liked Spyri’s book so much. Maybe Heidiland would show me what made the lightbulbs flicker on for him.
R was going through the novel again, via audiobook, by the time we arrived in Switzerland. He spent several happy days in Geneva launching himself into public fountains and decimating the Swiss chocolate supply with his mother and sister. Then father and son set off on a hastily planned two-night excursion to what I described to R (unwisely) as a “kind of theme park” with “lots of Heidi stuff.”
It was only after we left that I realized he had taken “stuff” to mean Heidi-themed rides at an American-style amusement park. He was expecting roller coasters, goat-shaped bumper cars. Animatronic Heidis with dark curls and dirndls.
Heidiland, I explained (unwisely), was just a fun name for a stretch of mountains where the book was set. The attractions were … rigorous hikes! Ye olde villages! Incredible views!
For much of our long train ride, I engaged in what New York City apartment brokers like to call “expectation management.” R was mostly quiet. We pulled into Maienfeld, a small farming town and one of Heidiland’s main hubs, just before noon.
Heidi is something of a national mascot in Switzerland. Her voice greets tram passengers at the Zurich airport; her name and wild-child likeness wrap around milk cartons and butter boxes and candy bars. In the highlands near Maienfeld, she is especially conspicuous. Road signs plot out a four-mile “Heidiweg,” or Heidi Trail, through bottle-green foothills and postcard hamlets, where tourists crowd Heidi hotels and restaurants.
“From the old and pleasantly situated village of Maienfeld,” Spyri’s novel begins, “a footpath winds through green and shady meadows to the foot of the mountains, which on this side look down from their stern and lofty heights upon the valley below.”
We did pass those meadows, but also vineyards, beefy medieval castles and flower-capped fountains. The hot grass thrummed with cicadas. We huffed uphill on narrow shoulderless roads as farm vehicles and bleating Peugeots swerved around us, until we reached a pasture appointed with statues of the book’s characters.
Here were the stern and lofty heights of Heididorf, a mock village where fans can see what the heroine’s farm, school and living spaces might have looked like. I took in the valley as I caught my breath, bludgeoned by the beauty, while my son relieved himself behind a spruce.
It was a weekday and the village wasn’t busy. For a while I watched R square the images he had cultivated for weeks in his head with these modest set pieces made of stucco and wood siding. He had a deep crimp between his eyes, the look of someone packing far too much into a suitcase far too small.
The interiors perplexed him even more. Tidy scenes of 19th-century life were laid out in period detail, suggesting preservation rather than creative interpretation. Even the wall labels treated Heidi as a historical figure, noting where she slept and worked with few hints of make-believe. “You are standing in the middle of the village of the most famous Swiss girl, Heidi,” read some banner text on the park map.
“Was Heidi real?” R finally asked.
I told him there were probably girls like her once. But she herself was pretend.
“Then who lived here?” he shot back.
“Nobody.”
R was by turns incredulous and entranced. Eight is the cruelest year, an age when myths deflate into hard forensic realities. Magic becomes sleight of hand; the logistics of Santa’s gift distribution stop making sense. But the revelation process isn’t so much like a veil being thrown off as it is a fuzzy world slowly coming into focus, and parts of it often go blurry again.
I should point out that “Heidi” is a novel more or less in the realist tradition, though it reaches an enchanted climax that I’ll go ahead and spoil for you: Clara, the disabled cousin in Frankfurt, visits Heidi in the mountains, and is so energized by the atmosphere and local goat’s milk that she’s suddenly able to walk.
Lazarus moment aside, the book could plausibly serve as the dramatized chronicle of real Swiss girls in the 1880s, albeit ones who believe in the transformative power of dairy products and fresh air. It even gestures at the social novel, pushing for a return to nature amid the crippling constraints of urbanization.
But what Spyri excels at, despite a few lurches into mawkishness, is infusing the mundane with the miraculous, and adopting the numinous awe that children have for what is still unexplained.
Here’s Heidi at sunset with her goatherd pal, Peter:
A golden light lay on the grass and flowers, and the rocks above were beginning to shine and glow. All at once she sprang to her feet, “Peter! Peter! Everything is on fire! All the rocks are burning, and the great snow mountain and the sky! … Look at the rocks! Look at the fir trees! Everything, everything is on fire!”
This was one of R’s favorite moments. “Do rocks actually glow in Switzerland?” he asked me one morning.
His fascination extended to the novel’s many invocations of God, its Christian doctrines of renewal and healing — all of which had been carefully scrubbed from the display texts and reading materials at Heididorf. For the sake of Heidi’s globe-spanning fan base, these omissions seemed prudent. But Spyri’s readers know that religious belief runs through her book like a live current, and R, the son of long-lapsed Protestants, was puzzled by its strange light.
There’s a lot to work out, after all. Why do some people, like his grandmothers, believe that an all-powerful god exists, while others, like his parents, do not? How can one person’s reality differ so drastically from someone else’s?
R ended up having a good time. He liked touring the old schoolroom, and climbing into Heidi’s attic, where a life-size model of the grandfather sat rather terrifyingly in the shadows. But I don’t know whether it was the village itself that appealed to him or an underlying communal pleasure, the simple fact of knowing that there are other people who like what you like, and that all of you are experiencing it the same way, if only briefly.
Plus there were goats to pet, and a fake cow that shot water from its rubber teats. We stayed for hours.
Our hotel was in a nearby spa town called Bad Ragaz, famed for its natural springs and health resorts. We were tired and ravenous after Heididorf and a brief stop at Pizol, a ski mountain where a series of gut-roiling cable cars took us, confusingly, to a different “Heidi Trail.” (We took selfies there with some goat statues and called it a day.)
Over refreshments on the hotel terrace, R and I got into a fight over plans for the next morning: whether we would stay in town or catch a scenic train called the Bernina Express. My son wanted to stay. He would eventually agree to the train, which meanders over glacier-topped peaks and preposterous feats of engineering, and would turn out to be one of the greatest travel experiences of my life. But in the late-afternoon heat, with an orange Fanta against his cheek, R was in no mood for more “stuff.”
We decided to resolve the matter with a duel to the death, to be held on the terrace at once. R went off to find some sticks. He rushed back seconds later with dinner-plate eyes: He’d seen a sign for a pool.
It is a truth widely known among parents that no matter where you go in the world, or how exotic the itinerary, the hotel pool will always be the highlight for your young children. To be fair, this one was magical after a day of Alp-hopping, the water arctic and curative. Watching my son, I recognized Heidi’s near-feral energy and optimism, her jolly disregard of decorum and civility, and it became a little clearer to me why R and generations of other unruly children had found a counterpart in her. Theirs was a joy burdened by neither earthly concerns nor fantasy — a love of present circumstance, of a real life that was plenty good enough.
We changed and returned to the terrace for dinner, which R ate with headphones on, listening to his audiobook. I didn’t mind. Behind him were mountains shagged with conifers, the bald peaks orange with light, then a radioactive pink. It was sunset, and the world was on fire.
The post I Gave My Son the Books I Loved. He Chose ‘Heidi’ Instead. appeared first on New York Times.
