John-Antoine Nau

John-Antoine Nau

John-Antoine Nau (* as Eugène Léon Édouard Torquet November 19, 1860 in San Francisco , † March 17, 1918 in Tréboul ) was a French writer. He is best known for his 1903 novel Force ennemie , which won the first Prix ​​Goncourt that same year .

Life

Nau (which is his later pseudonym as a writer) was born the son of a French engineer and businessman who emigrated to California around 1845 and died of typhus in 1864. He was originally an American. The widow returned to France with three children in 1866. From 1881 Nau was the second helmsman on a three-master in the Caribbean and later as a merchant in Colombia, Venezuela and New York. In 1883 he was back in France and married in 1885. Originally he wanted to go to Martinique with his wifeemigrated, but stayed in France for family reasons, where he began a wandering life. His first volume of poetry appeared in 1897, which he published at his own expense, and his first novel in 1903 while he was living in San Tropez. He lived temporarily in Spain, Corsica, the Canary Islands, Algeria. In 1916/17 he was back in Paris because of the war and then in Brittany.

Force ennemie is about a poet Phillipe Veuly, who, without knowing exactly why, ends up in a psychiatric institution, apparently admitted by a relative. He's obsessed with the voices of an alien. In the institution he falls in love with a fellow patient and follows her around the world when she leaves the institution. The book has satirical elements and elements of black humor and is considered early science fiction. The author was hardly known at the time, he had only published a few stories in La Revue Blanche and a volume of poetry at his own expense. The novel was not a success either, nor had it been reviewed because he had not sent it in for review (he did not write to make money, but was financially independent). However, Joris-Karl Huysmans , President of the Goncourt Academy, considered it a masterpiece.

Nau was influenced by Gustave Flaubert . He was friends with painters and poets such as Apollinaire and Jean Royère (1871–1956), who also published some of his works posthumously.

He also translated Dostoevsky into French (Journal d'un écrivain).

Some of his works were only published posthumously.

Fonts

Novels, short stories:

• Enemy force, 1903, wikisource (English edition Enemy Force , Black Coat Press 2010)
• Le Prêteur d'amour 1905
• La Gennia, roman spirite hétérodoxe 1906, reprint Paris: Austral 1996
• Cristóbal le poète 1912
• Thérèse Donati, mœurs corses 1921, reprint Ajaccio 2003
• Les Galanteries d'Anthime Budin 1923
• Pilotins 1923
• Les Trois Amours de Benigno Reyes 1923
• Caraïbe archipelago 1929

Poems:

• Au seuil de l'espoir 1897, Archives
• Le Jardin des jacinthes. Fleur de mirage. Poèmes 1901
• Hiers bleus, Paris: Vanier 1904
• Vers la fée Viviane. Errances. Côte d'émeraude Relu et corrigé 1905
• En suivant les goélands 1914, archives
• Poèmes triviaux et mystiques 1924
• Poésies antillaises, Paris: Mourlot 1972 (illustrations by Henri Matisse )

Letters:

• Lettres exotiques 1933
• Lettres de Corse et de Bretagne 1949

literature

• Jean-Francois Chassay: Une évasion paradoxale: Le fantastique de John-Antoine Nau, Ninteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 43, No. 3/4, 2015, pp. 239–249

Web links

• Information on John-Antoine Nau in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France .