Jean-Claude Izzo

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean-Claude Izzo (born June 20, 1945 in Marseille ; † January 26, 2000 there ) was a French journalist and writer.

He owed his fame above all to the crime novels of the “Marseille Trilogy” Total Khéops , Chourmo and Soléa . It was in the tradition of the French Néo-Polar , crime literature with a socially critical impact. Izzo saw himself as a student of Leonardo Sciascia .

Life

Born in 1945 as the son of an Italian immigrant and a “half-Spanish woman”, Jean-Claude Izzo grew up in Marseille and the surrounding area. He began to write poetry at an early age as an autodidact. He was involved in politics, worked as a journalist and finally moved to Paris in 1987, where he was editor-in-chief of Viva magazine until he was fired because of political conflicts.

In the following years he published more and more literary works, including scripts and crime stories. Total Khéops was published by Gallimard in 1995, and Chourmo the following year . Izzo moved from Paris to Saint-Malo , and later to Ceyreste . In 1998, Soléa was the final volume of the “Marseille Trilogy”. Jean-Claude Izzo died of lung cancer on January 26, 2000. He was only known in Germany after his death and was awarded the German Crime Prize in 2001 for Chourmo .

Izzo has set a literary monument in his works, especially his hometown Marseille. He himself wrote: “Being born in Marseille is never an accident. Marseille has always been the port of exiles [...]. Wherever you come from, you are at home in Marseille. On the streets you come across familiar faces, familiar smells. Marseille is familiar to you. From the very first moment. "

The Marseille trilogy

Les Goudes - Montales residence
Le Panier - Montale's youth district
Vallon des Auffes - home of the fisherman Felix

The three novels in the Marseille trilogy revolve around Fabio Montale, a police officer from the Marseilles suburbs who fights against crime in the form of a corrupt police apparatus, the mafia and an alliance of right-wing extremists and Islamic fundamentalists. Montale, like Izzo himself, comes from a migrant family and, despite the violence that surrounds him, he has never lost his heart for ordinary people. The backdrop for the novels is the city of Marseille, a melting pot of cultures and home for homeless sailors and other stranded people. Her Mediterranean flair and Izzo's preferences for good food and music run through the trilogy despite the ever-present violence.

Total Khéops (German: Total Cheops)

The first novel in the trilogy takes Montale into his own past. He meets his childhood sweetheart Lole again, and his two childhood friends Manu and Ugo are murdered. Apparently independent of these events is the brutal rape of Leila, the daughter of an Algerian immigrant friend. But the deeper Montale penetrates into the swamp of crime, the more the cases are linked to a network of power struggles within the mafia and right-wing extremist cells. Against resistance from the police's own ranks, Montale manages to solve the crimes. Total Khéops, based on a song published by IAM in 1989 , means something like "knee deep in the shit".

Chourmo

In the second novel, Montale has quit the police force. But his past catches up with him again, this time in the form of his cousin Gélou, who asks him to look for her missing son. Montale finds out that her son was disposed of as a witness to a murder. When the street worker Serge is shot in front of his eyes during his investigation, Montale uncovered a conspiracy of Islamist fundamentalists. And he realizes that right-wing extremist circles are also involved in the police, right down to his former colleagues. Chourmo, also a CD track for the Massilia Sound System , was the name given to the rowers of the galley ships .

Solea

In the final novel, the signs are reversed. Montale is no longer chasing the Mafia, but the Mafia is hunting him. Babette, a journalist friend, has collected explosive documents in a research on the Mafia that document the trace of organized crime far into the circles of business and politics. The mafia blackmailed Montale in order to get to Babette and her documents through him and gradually kills all the people who are important to him. Montale confronts the killers and ends up being one of their victims himself. Solea, based on a song by Miles Davis , describes Izzo as the backbone of sung flamenco .

Film adaptations

  • In 2001 the trilogy was filmed for the French TV channel TF1 under the title Fabio Montale . The main role was played by Alain Delon , which caused outrage among Izzo's relatives and his fans because of the right-wing populist sympathies of the actor.

Radio plays and readings

1997 produced and sent the Germany radio , the radio play Total Cheops with Hans Peter Hall wax , Hilmar Eichhorn and Anna Thalbach in the lead roles. Harald Brandt had edited the work for the radio, directed by Ulrich Gerhardt . The radio play was published in 2002 by Der Audio Verlag . The sequels Chourmo and Solea , edited by Ulrich Gerhardt, were broadcast on Deutschlandradio in 2003; however, they were not published as a radio play. For repetition in July 2019, the broadcaster put the complete radio play trilogy online as a download for one year.

In 2005 GoyaLiT published both novels as audio books , read by Dietmar Mues . Other novels by Izzo that Dietmar Mues read are Aldebaran (2004) and Die Sonne der Derbenden (2006). In 2005, WDR produced a radio play version of the last-mentioned novel with Helmut Zierl .

Works

  • Poèmes à haute voix 1970
  • Terres de feu 1972
  • État de veille 1974
  • Braises, brasiers, brûlures 1975
  • Paysage de femme 1975
  • Le réel au plus vif 1976
  • Clovis Hughes, un rouge du Midi 1978
  • Total Khéops 1995 (German: Total Cheops 2000)
  • Chourmo 1996 (German: Chourmo , 2000)
  • Loin de tous rivages 1997
  • Les marins perdus 1997 (German: Aldebaran 2002)
  • Vivre fatigue 1998 (German: Life makes you tired 2005)
  • Soléa , 1998 (German: Solea 2001)
  • L'Aride des jours 1999
  • Le soleil des mourants 1999 (German: Die Sonne der Derbenden 2003)
  • Un temps immobile 1999

Awards

literature

  • Wolfgang Schwarzer: Jean-Claude Izzo 1945 - 2000. in Jan-Pieter Barbian (Red.): Vive la littérature! French literature in German translation. Edited and published by Duisburg City Library . ISBN 9783892796565 , p. 17 (with ill.)
  • Daniel Winkler: Mediterranean nostalgia in series. The intertextual aesthetics of Jean-Claude Izzo's detective novels and the Alain Delon case . In: Elisabeth Arend u. a. (Ed.): Mediterranean Discourses in Literature and Film . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-58840-6 , pp. 215-231.

swell

  1. ^ A b Jean-Claude Izzo: "This is how I like Marseille"
  2. ↑ Jean-Claude Izzo: My city is an open door from dsb .: Izzo's Marseille . Union, Zurich 2003, p. 26
  3. ^ Jean-Claude Izzo: The Marseille Trilogy . Unionsverlag, Zurich 2004, p. 168. ISBN 3-293-00332-X
  4. ↑ Izzo: The Marseille Trilogy , p. 657
  5. ^ Jean-Claude Izzo: The Marseille Trilogy . Unionsverlag, Zurich 2004, p. 279
  6. ↑ Izzo: The Marseille Trilogy , p. 474
  7. ↑ Alain Delon . In: Der Spiegel . No. 52 , 2000 ( online - 25 December 2000 ).
  8. ↑ Radio plays by Jean-Claude Izzo for listening and downloading from Deutschlandfunk Kultur .
  9. ^ French cinema adaptation 2003: Directed by Claire Devers, with Bernard Giraudeau, Miki Manojlović, Marie Trintignant & Audrey Tautou. 2008 as a comic strip (Bande dessinée) drawn by Clément Belin

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Izzo, Jean-Claude
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Marseille , France
DATE OF DEATH January 26, 2000
Place of death Marseille , France