Albert Cossery

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Albert Cossery ( Arabic ألبرت قيصري) (Born November 3, 1913 in Cairo ; † June 22, 2008 in Paris ) was an Egyptian Francophone writer .

Life

Albert Cossery in 1913 as the son of a middle class, from Damietta originating Coptic born family. As was the custom in wealthy families at the time, he was sent to a Christian French school. At the age of ten he was already interested in French literature and began to write novels and poems.

Henry Miller , whom he met during a trip to the USA, enabled him to publish his first collection of novels in 1940 ( Les hommes oubliés de Dieu , Men God forgot ). In 1945 he moved to Paris, where he lived in a room in the Hotel La Louisiane on Rue de Seine until his death in 2008.

Works

All of Albert Cossery's novels are set in Egypt. His books are full of irony, but never cynical. They make fun of the vanity and limitations of a materialistically oriented world and portray the contrast between poverty and wealth, the powerful and the powerless in a funny and dramatic way.

Its main characters are often tramps, thieves or dandies who subvert the order of an unjust society. They are often autobiographical, like Teymour, the hero of the novel Un complot de saltimbanques , a young man who, after a life abroad devoted to pleasure instead of study, forges a diploma as a chemical engineer and returns to his hometown, where he and his dandy- Friends get into an unexpected intrigue against the authorities.

Cossery was valued by some as a free thinker, as the last genuinely anarchist writer of Western culture, due to his humorous and provocative, at the same time clear and deep view of the relationships between people and society. His writing style followed neither academic rules nor the standards of the avant-garde.

Adaptations

Two of his novels ( Les Couleurs de l'infamie and Mendiants et orgueilleux ) were adapted as comics by Golo . In addition, several films were made based on his books, including The Persecuted from 1974.

Awards

bibliography

  • Les Couleurs de l'infamie
  • Une ambition dans le désert
  • La Violence et la dérision , German violence and laughter , Düsseldorf: Rauch, 1966; NA Berlin: Schelzky and Jeep, 1984 and 2000
  • Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu
  • La maison de la mort certaine
  • Les Couleurs de l'infamie
  • Les Fénéants dans la vallée fertile
  • Mendiants et orgueilleux , dt. Gohar the beggar. Roman , Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1996, as paperback: Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1998
  • Un complot de saltimbanques
  • Albert Cossery, an Egyptian in Paris. Essays , Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1995

Web links

proof

  1. ↑ “Albert Cossery, 'Voltaire of the Nile,' dies at 94” ( Memento from July 8, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ), AFP , June 23, 2008 (English)
  2. ^ History of Hôtel La Louisiane
personal data
SURNAME Cossery, Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Egyptian French language writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Cairo
DATE OF DEATH June 22, 2008
Place of death Paris