Lucien Vassal

Lucien Vassal (* 1937 in Marseille ) is a French writer, politician and physics teacher.

Lucien Vassal, September 2018

biography

Lucien Vassal was a physics teacher at a college in Marseille-St.-Antoine. As a communist member of the city council of Marseille, he was involved in the field of urban planning and the environment and was district mayor of the northern arrondissements of Marseille from 1983 to 1995. In the course of his intensive literary activity that then began, he captured the history of the city of Marseille, in particular that of the population groups in the north-west of the city, many of whom came from immigration. The phenomenal memory of his father, who lived to be a hundred years old, was of great help to him.

His mother had Spanish roots and was born in Algeria. His father's father ran a bar-tabac in La Viste near Marseille and a large garden restaurant where celebrities like Fernandel and Yves Montand performed.

Lucien Vassal has grown together with the history of the city of Marseille, the surrounding villages and the landscape, the sea, not only because he grew up here, but because he followed, helped shape and researched the political development of the city attentively, inquisitively and fearlessly.

Literary work

His novels tell the history of the north-western working-class districts of Marseille (La Viste, Saint-Antoine, L'Estaque ), in which he lived and worked throughout his life. They bear testimony to the lives of the little people who are torn by the events of great history. His mostly autobiographical work combines memories and fiction in a rousing style, but is always embedded in a more comprehensive historical context, which he repeatedly documents inconspicuously but aptly.

Enzella (2004, translated into German) describes the life of a young Spanish woman who found refuge in L'Estaque at the end of the Spanish civil war , and her love for a German occupation soldier whose passion was not war but painting and his role model Cézanne . Vassal received the Prix ​​international du roman des Arts et Lettres de France for this novel .

In the trilogy des Collines , which earned him the prix de l'Académie de Marseille , you can feel the breath of history in every chapter. La Colline vert de gris is set in occupied Marseille during World War II; La Colline aux genets provides an insight into everyday life in the Fourth Republic that followed the war ; " La Colline pourpre " spans the period between the Algerian War and the fall of the Berlin Wall and shows him as a militant student, teacher and politician.

Les Noces de palissandre (2015), thematizes the broken history of migrants through the fate of his own family, in which almost every strand of immigration - from Spain , Italy , Armenia and Kabylia - is rooted.

His last novel to date, Au temps de la Male Bête (2018), deals with the mysterious attacks by the beast of Gévaudan , which upset an entire region in the 18th century.

List of his novels

• La colline Vert-de-Gris , P. Tacussel, Marseille 2000;
• Enzella , éd. Auberon, 2004; German translation: Edition Contra-Bass, Hamburg 2012;
• La colline aux genêts , P. Tacussel, Marseille 2007;
• Black Gloves. Sur les Traces d'Ulysse , P. Tacussel, Marseille 2010;
• La Colline pourpre , P. Tacussel, Marseille 2012;
• Les Noces de palissandre , Jean Marie Desbois éditeur, Les Baux-de-Provence 2015; German translation: Edition Contra-Bass, Hamburg 2018;
• Au temps de la Male Bête , P. Tacussel, Marseille 2018.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ville-gardanne.fr
2. ↑ contra-bass.de
3. ↑ editions.geneprovence.com
4. ↑ academie.sla.mars.free.fr
5. ↑ mairie-cadolive.fr