Laurent Binet

Laurent Binet (2019)

Laurent Binet (born July 19, 1972 in Paris ) is a French writer . In 2010 he was awarded the Prix ​​Goncourt du premier roman for his novel HHhH ; its Japanese translation was also awarded the Japanese Booksellers Prize in 2014.

Career

Binet studied in Paris before doing his military service in Slovakia at the Air Force School in Košice as a French teacher. He then commuted between Prague and Paris for a few years . Today (2011) he works as a professeur Agrégé de littérature modern in the Paris area , but is also entrusted with university courses at the University of Paris VIII .

In 2000 he published his first book, the surrealism- inspired story Forces et faiblesses de nos muqueuses ( strengths and weaknesses of our mucous membranes ). In 2004 he published his second book, La Vie professionnelle de Laurent B. ( The professional life of Laurent B. ), in which he reports on his experience teaching in Paris schools.

In January 2010, Grasset published HHhH (the acronym for “Himmler's brain is called Heydrich”, a saying by Hermann Göring ). The focus of the novel is the SS-Obergruppenführer , head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) and Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in Prague , Reinhard Heydrich, and the assassination attempt on him by the Czech resistance fighters Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík (" Operation Anthropoid "). On March 2, 2010 the author was awarded the “Prix Goncourt du premier roman” for his work. After the book was published, it became known that about 20 pages had been deleted by the editing department, on which Binet had dealt extremely critically with Jonathan Littell's novel The Well-Minded (2006). The German translation of HHhH was published in September 2011. In 2015 he received the Prix ​​Interallié and the Prix ​​du Roman Fnac for The Seventh Language Function ( La Septième Fonction du langage ) .

In 2019, Binet published Civilizations, a novel about an alternative world history , according to which the daughter of Erik the Red colonized America as early as 1000. The American natives know horses and the art of iron forging and centuries later they form protective antibodies against Christopher Columbus and his men, who will not return from their expedition to the west in 1492. In 1531 the Inca leader Atahualpa flees from the army of his brother Huáscar and "discovers" Europe. Civilizations was awarded the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie française in the year of its publication .

Works

Binet in 2010

• Forces et faiblesses de nos muqueuses , Le Manuscrit, Paris 2001 ISBN 2-74810014-X .
• La Vie professionnelle de Laurent B , Little Big Man, Paris 2004 ISBN 2-915557-52-7 .
• HHhH. , Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, Paris 2010 ISBN 978-2-246-76001-6 .
  • German: HHhH. Himmler's brain is called Heydrich . Novel. Translated by Mayela Gerhardt. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2011 ISBN 978-3-498-00668-6 .
• Rien ne se passe comme prévu . Grasset, Paris 2012 ISBN 978-2-246799337 .
• La Septième Fonction du langage . Grasset, Paris 2015 ISBN 978-2-246-77601-7 .
  • German: The seventh language function . Novel. Translated from Kristian Wachinger. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2017 ISBN 978-3-498-00676-1 .
• Civilizations . Grasset, Paris 2019 ISBN 978-2246813095 .

literature

• Nathan Bracher: Une histoire nommée désir. Revivre le passé à l'imparfait du présent avec HHhH de Laurent Binet, in magazine of French language and literature, 125, 2 (April). Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2016 ISSN  0044-2747 (Print) pp. 134–150.

Web links

• Extract from HHhH on the publisher's website (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the report in Le Monde .
2. ↑ See, for example, the report in L'Express .
3. ↑ Laurent Binet reçoit le Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française pour "Civilizations" . In: ouest-france.fr, October 31, 2019 (accessed November 15, 2019).
4. ^ Gerhardt in the translator database of the VdÜ , 2019