Léon and Louise

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Léon and Louise is a novel by the Swiss writer Alex Capus that was published in February 2011 .

content

At the beginning of the novel in 1986, Léon le Gall, the grandfather of the first-person narrator, is laid out in the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral , the family has taken their seats in the pews. A graceful old lady appears, bends over the coffin, kisses the dead man on the forehead and puts her cheek on his, her lips opening in a silent laugh. Then she takes a bicycle bell from her handbag, rings it twice and puts it in the coffin. Finally she gives the astonished family a victorious smile and disappears. This woman is Louise, Léon's lover and great love for decades.

The novel now jumps back to the beginning of their relationship. In 1918, both Léon and Louise ended up in the tranquil Normandy town of St.-Luc-sur-Marne as a result of the turmoil of the First World War , Léon as the station master's morse assistant and Louise as the mayor's assistant. There the two 17-year-olds get to know each other and fall in love. The lovable, phlegmatic Léon and the self-confident Louise spend a weekend together on the beach in the port city of Le Tréport , which from now on divides their lives into the time before and after Le Tréport (p. 79). On the way back, however, they get caught in an air raid. They are separated from one another, seriously injured, and each thinks the other is dead. It is only ten years later that they meet again by chance in Paris. You can see yourself through the windows of two metro trains driving away in opposite directions. Léon, who has thought of Louise every day for the past ten years, is now married to Yvonne and has a son. He manages to find Louise and the two spend another passionate night together, but agree not to see each other again in the future.

The Second World War begins and the German soldiers march into Paris. The gold from the Banque de France is brought to a safe place in Africa. Louise accompanies this transport as a secretary and spends the war years in Senegal . Léon and his family experience the German occupation in Paris . Léon continues to work as a police chemist, but is harassed by the German chief of the security police , SS-Hauptsturmführer Bone . However, in a skillful manner, he courageously offers resistance.

The great distance between them encourages Louise to get in touch with Léon. She writes him three long letters from Sudan. After the war and their return from Africa , Léon and Louise meet again. On a boat owned by Léon, they can see each other regularly, tolerated by Yvonne. But the boat always remains firmly moored at its berth. In the course of the story, Yvonne and Léon have four more children. Only after Yvonne's death did Léon and Louise, now both 62 years old, go out to sea together.

Remarks

In his novels and stories, Alex Capus combines meticulously researched historical facts with fictional narrative threads. When he conceptualized the novel Léon and Louise , he was guided by the life story of his grandfather, with whom he spent the first five years of his life. He was a police chemist on the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris and, like Léon, lived in the Rue des Ecoles. In addition, the lover and the opening scene in which the family sees the lover for the first time are based on the life of Alex Capu's grandfather.

The love story, however, is the author's invention. It was important to him to place the description of this relationship in a larger context and historical events , because from his point of view love is an activity “that one engages in actively dealing with one's environment, with the society in which one lives, with people and Animal, and Justice and Police, and Military, and War and Peace ”. He does not describe the historical events from the bird's eye view of the omniscient narrator, but from the experience of the characters in the novel, from the frog's perspective .

criticism

The novel was received unanimously positively by the critics. Rose-Maria Gropp from the FAZ describes it as “a wonderful story whose strength lies in its language, but at the same time in all the things that are not dragged into the language”. The NZZ praises the “fabulous character drawings” in the description of the “tragic and comical events” and the Süddeutsche Zeitung writes that the novel “looks like a string of genre scenes over long periods. The fact that a lot of cheerful and melancholy déja-vus is produced under the extensive circumnavigation of kitsch cliffs, that the combination of war, love and family chronicle here neither appears trite nor sentimental, is very appealing to the author. "

Léon and Louise was nominated for the German Book Prize 2011.

Interpretative approaches

There are different interpretations of this book, some of which are based on quotes from Alex Capus. One interpretation is the importance of Léon and Yvonne's relationship for the simple reason that they have been married for so long. In addition, the book shows in several scenes that you cannot escape your past. Above all, the reunion of Louise in the Paris Métro supports this interpretation. There are also readers who see Yvonne as overcompensation for Louise because of her enormous differences in character. Marrying her may have been a reaction from Léon to compensate for the pain of Louise's loss.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.alexcapus.de
  2. ↑ http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/weltgeschichte-aus-der-froschperspektiven.700.de.html?dram:article_id=85055
  3. ↑ http://www.buecher.de/shop/schweiz/lon-und-louise/capus-alex/products_products/content/prod_id/32531455/
  4. ↑ Love in times of war. In: nzz.ch. March 18, 2011, accessed October 14, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Information on content and speakers on the radio play pages of SRF.

Secondary literature

Annette Derksen: With Léon and Louise through Normandy to Paris - A literary travel companion - In the footsteps of Alex Capus' bestseller 2014