Alex Capus

Alex Capus [Kapy] (* 23 July 1961 as Alexandre Michel Ernest Capus in Mortagne-au-Perche , France ) is a Swiss writer .

Alex Capus at the Erlanger Poetenfest 2018

Life

Alex Capus was born in Normandy to a French and a Swiss woman. He spent the first five years of his life in Paris with his grandfather, who was a police chemist on the Quai des Orfèvres . In 1966 he moved to Olten in Switzerland with his mother . He studied history, philosophy and ethnology at the University of Basel and also worked (from around 1986 to 1995) as a journalist for various Swiss daily newspapers. For four years he worked as a domestic editor at the Swiss dispatch agency in Bern.

Today Alex Capus lives as a freelance writer in Olten. The French-Swiss citizen is married to Nadja Capus and has five sons. From November 2009 to April 2012 he was President of the Social Democratic Party in Olten.

Works / works

Alex Capus during a reading in Krefeld (2013)

Capus published This Cursed Gravity in 1994 . In 1997 Munzinger Pascha appeared , a "classic" story. In this novel, Capus already refers to historical events and to the Swiss Africa explorer Werner Munzinger . The book is a kind of literary biography. Eiger Mönchundjungfrau appeared in 1998. 19 short stories can be found in this book. Another collection of short stories followed in 2001 with My Study of Distant Worlds , but these are now linked by the protagonists .

Next, Capus released Fast a Bit Spring 2002, a mixture of documentary and narrative. In it he describes the story of Kurt Sandweg and Valdemar Velte from Wuppertal, who want to escape the rule of the Nazi regime. After robbing a bank, however, their escape only leads to Basel, where they become involved in a relationship with two local women. After a long hunt by the police, the two are finally caught.

In 2003 the book Do you think it was love? which leaves the everyday realms of the previous works - with the exception of Munzinger Pascha , all of his books that have been published up to then are set in everyday Switzerland. In 2004, 13 True Stories , a collection of historical miniatures, was published.

In 2005 the factual novel Reisen im Licht der Sterne was published , in which Capus follows Robert Louis Stevenson's odyssey through the South Seas in detailed detective work . He describes his married and family dramas in the Samoas jungle and his arduous everyday life in the supposed island paradise. Ultimately, Capus came to the conclusion that the Scottish poet and author of Treasure Island only spent the last years of his life in the South Seas because he himself was on a treasure hunt on Tafahi , a small neighboring island of Samoa. The work has been translated into English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

In 2006 Capus published the portrait collection Patriarchs , in which he portrays ten great company founders such as Henri Nestlé , Rudolf Lindt , Julius Maggi and Carl Franz Bally . He always looks for the moment in which their idea crystallized, asks about the historical and social circumstances under which they rose to become global economic power, and shows that entrepreneurial adventures are always associated with human ventures, disappointed hopes and family tragedies are.

In 2007 his novel A Question of Time was published . In it, Capus tells the adventurous story of three North German shipyard workers, based on authentic events, who were commissioned in 1913 to dismantle the Goetzen steamship and reassemble it in colonial Africa on Lake Tanganyika . When the First World War breaks out, the British stationed on the opposite bank suddenly become enemies. Nobody wants to, but everyone has to wage war because they are all prisoners of their time. The novel was a great success in Germany, sold over 70,000 times and was translated into English, Dutch, Norwegian, Hebrew, Japanese and Greek.

In September 2007 the magazine published an article about the Swiss balloon pioneer and photographer Eduard Spelterini . The unabridged edition of the text appeared in the illustrated book Eduard Spelterini - Photographs of the Balloon Pioneer. His volume Der König von Olten from 2009 combines short stories with lots of local color from his hometown. The title character is a black and white cat named "Toulouse".

In Léon and Louise , a novel published in February 2011, Capus tells the love affair between Léon and Louise, based on the life story of his paternal grandfather. In a kind of triangular relationship, which mainly takes place during the First World War in Normandy and during the Second World War in Paris, Léon only manages to break away from his eternal and yet unattainable love for Louise on the outside. Capus was nominated for the German Book Prize 2011 for this book .

In addition to his own work as a writer Capus has four novels of John Fante and the American cult novel A Confederacy of Dunces ( A Confederacy of Dunces ) by John Kennedy Toole translated into German.

Awards

• 1995: Regiobank Solothurn Literature Prize
• 1996: Working year for the Canton of Solothurn
• 1998: Pro Helvetia year of work
• 1998: Sponsorship award from the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft in the BDI
• 2005: Sponsorship award from the Canton of Solothurn
• 2005: Acknowledgment award from the city of Olten

Works

• That damn gravity. Stories. Editions des copains, Olten 1994. ( self-published ); newly published in: Eigermönchundjungfrau Diogenes, Zurich 1998 and dtv, Munich 2004.
• Munzinger Pasha. Novel. Diogenes, Zurich 1997; Revised new edition: dtv, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-423-13076-8 .
• Eiger monk maiden. Stories. Diogenes, Zurich 1998; Revised new edition: dtv, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-423-13227-2 .
• My study of distant worlds. A novel in 14 stories. Residence, Salzburg 2001; dtv, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-423-13065-2 .
• Almost a little bit of Spring. Novel. Residence, Salzburg 2002; dtv, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-423-13167-5 .
• Do you think it was love Novel. Residence, Salzburg 2003; dtv, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-423-13295-7 .
• 13 true stories. Historical miniatures. Deuticke, Vienna 2004; dtv, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-423-13470-4 .
• Travel in the light of the stars . A speculation. Novel. Knaus, Munich 2005; btb, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-442-73659-1 , new edition: Travel in the light of the stars . Hanser, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-446-24899-1 .
• Patriarchs. Ten portraits. Knaus, Munich 2006; btb, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-442-73757-4 .
• A question of time. Novel. Knaus, Munich 2007; btb, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-442-73911-0 .
• Sky striker. Twelve portraits. Knaus, Munich 2008; btb, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-442-74075-8 .
• Something very, very beautiful. Stories. dtv, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-423-08224-2 .
• The King of Olten. Stories. Knapp, Olten 2009, ISBN 978-3-905848-17-5 .
• The meeting in Brakel. You have it in your hand. Six short stories. Callwey, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-7667-1870-9 .
• Léon and Louise . Novel. Hanser, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-446-23630-1 .
• The King of Olten returns. Stories. Knapp, Olten 2011, ISBN 978-3-905848-39-7 .
• Skidoo. Narrative. Hanser, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-446-24084-1 .
• The forger, the spy and the bomb maker . Novel. Hanser, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24327-9 .
• My neighbor Urs. Tales from the small town. Hanser, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-446-24468-9 .
• Life is good. Hanser, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-446-25267-7 .
• Royal children. Hanser, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-446-26009-2 .

Translations

• John Fante : I - Arturo Bandini. Goldmann, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-442-54185-9 .
• John Fante: Wait until spring, Bandini. Goldmann, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-442-54196-4 .
• John Fante: Waiting for miracles. Goldmann, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-442-46122-7 .
• John Fante: 1933 was a bad year. Blumenbar, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-351-05031-3 .
• John Kennedy Toole : The Idiot Conspiracy. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-608-93900-2 .
• James M. Cain : The postman always rings twice . Kampa, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-311-12001-8 .

literature

• Entry about Alex Capus in the lexicon of the Association of Authors of Switzerland
• Alex Capus in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• Madeleine Schüpfer : Alex Capus - a portrait . In: Oltner Neujahrsblätter , Vol. 57, 1999, pp. 54–55.

Web links

Commons : Alex Capus  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Publications by and about Alex Capus in the Helveticat catalog of the Swiss National Library
• Literature by and about Alex Capus in the catalog of the German National Library
• Alex Capus's website
• Alex Capus in an interview about locations in his work
• Annotated link collection of the university library of the FU Berlin ( Memento from August 9, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (Ulrich Goerdten)

Remarks

1. ↑ ^{a b} Entry about Alex Capus in the lexicon of the Association of Authors of Switzerland , accessed on December 14, 2018.
2. ↑ Permit: Ms. Alex Capus in bazonline, accessed on December 31, 2016.
3. ↑ Alex Capus: A family man writes about love  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Ruhr news  
4. ^ Writer Alex Capus elected Olten SP party president. In: solothurnerzeitung.ch, November 4, 2009.
5. ↑ 10 portraits: Rudolf Lindt , Carl Franz Bally , Julius Maggi , Antoine Le Coultre , Henri Nestle , Johann Jacob Leu , Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche , Charles Brown with Walter Boveri , Walter Gerber and Emil Georg Bührle
6. ↑ Review , portraits of: Madame Tussaud , Jean-Paul Marat , Regula Engel-Egli , Ferdinand Hassler , Samuel Johann Pauli , Hans Jakob Meyer , Maria Manning , Adolf Haggenmacher , Eduard Spelterini , Isabelle Eberhardt , Pierre Gilliard and Fritz Zwicky