Vera Kessler

Kessler's terrain is the entire continent, but her starting point is always the same: something completely banal. A wrongly booked refund that needs correcting. An exemption permit for a club event. A complaint about a parking space that takes the prescribed route through three different offices. Whether municipal administration, cantonal agency, insurance ombudsman's office, or EU directive: Kessler isn't interested in where a procedure fails. She's interested in where a procedure works — and what becomes of a single banal request once every office it touches does its job properly.

Her protagonists are never bystanders. They are the reason the chain gets going in the first place. Each of them wants something reasonable, brings it to the right office, and thereby triggers a reaction they can no longer stop themselves — usually because their own next fix extends the chain instead of ending it. In the end, the damage lands on exactly the people they meant to protect. That's not an aside. It's the point.

Her sentences get shorter as the damage grows. Kessler writes forms, meeting minutes, waiting-room displays, and automated confirmation emails that don't decorate — they change something: a deadline, an access right, a jurisdiction. Nobody in her texts remarks on how absurd the situation has become by now — the next caseworker simply takes over the file and carries on. That's exactly where the humour lies, and exactly why you laugh with her characters rather than at them: at every single moment, each of them does the obvious thing.

Kessler grew up in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland's only officially bilingual city, where every form exists twice and every resolution has to be translated twice before it takes effect. Her mother worked the counter at the residents' registration office; her father kept the maintenance schedules for the municipal elevators. At the family table, talk was rarely about politics. It was about why a form had one field more in one language version than in the other, and what happened to the people who filled it out wrong because they'd grabbed the wrong version.

She studied Business Administration with a focus on Public Management at Bern University of Applied Sciences. Her first job was at the ombudsman's office of a health insurer, handling minor complaints: misrecorded invoices, rejected micro-claims, applications accidentally filed twice. She was good at it. Too good, as it turned out — her resolution rate was so high that a canton's internal office for administrative simplification poached her, with the mandate to identify and cut unnecessary process steps in social welfare, building, and education administration.

She spent nine years there. She cut duplications in the billing process for supplementary welfare benefits and watched the time saved resurface elsewhere as a second layer of review. She simplified a building-permit procedure and watched the simplification trigger a new wave of appeals that required a new form. Every autumn she had to write an impact report that was required to end with the sentence: "No undesired side effects observed." Her own case files said otherwise, but case files aren't a reporting format.

So she started writing the real version on the side — at first just for herself, then for one colleague, then for more people than she was comfortable with. She noticed fiction was the only format in which she was allowed to say what her own numbers had shown all along. She left the canton; she took the case-file binder with her — for research purposes, as she puts it.

Today she lives in Bern, with occasional working stints in Brussels, where she studies EU directives and their national implementations, because the same chain simply runs one administrative level larger there. On her desk sits a binder labelled "Form 14b, sequentially numbered" — every new case she researches gets a number in the same series her real files once used. She says it helps her keep track. It's currently up to number 340.

For nine years I improved processes that worked better afterward and still caused more harm. Not because anyone was sloppy. Because every single step was correct, and nobody had planned for the sum of the correct steps. My impact reports weren't allowed to say that. My novels are.

I write about people who want something entirely reasonable — a correction, an exception, a clarification — and bring it to the office in charge. The office does its job correctly. The correct work turns into a side effect, fixing the side effect turns into the next one, until in the end there's a state of affairs nobody feels responsible for, because every single person only did their own part. To me, that's not an accusation. It's an observation I spent nine years producing myself before I started writing it down.

There are no villains in these stories, because in nine years I never met a single one. There are only people doing their jobs, and forms doing exactly what they were built to do. If that's funny — and I think it is — it's because every step makes complete sense on its own, and yet nobody would sign off on the sum of them.

I like my characters. Even the ones who trigger the next harm while fixing the last one. Especially those. They do what I myself used to do: the obvious thing, on time, to the best of their knowledge. I write down what happens next. Number 341 is already on my desk.