Nelly Arcan

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Nelly Arcan (born March 5, 1973 in Lac-Mégantic , † September 24, 2009 in Montreal ; actually Isabelle Fortier ) was a Canadian writer .

Childhood and youth

Isabelle Fortier grew up in a Catholic family in rural Quebec and became interested in literature during puberty. She was considered a quiet and closed loner, which she suffered from according to her own statements. After completing a social science education at a vocational high school in the city of Sherbrooke , the “capital” of her closer homeland, she moved to Montreal in 1994 to study literature. The change from her previous, rather village-like, small-town living environment to the metropolis also changed her way of life, which she herself characterized as "dissolute, Sodom and Gomorrah ". She worked as an escort model to finance her studies . Her master's thesis dealt with the memorabilia of a nervous patient Daniel Paul Schrebers .

Writing and Death

With her debut as a writer, Isabelle Fortier switched to Nelly Arcan , with the echo of her new surname to the secret (Latin: arcanum ). Her first novel Putain was published in 2001, after she finished her studies, under her stage name . This novel, like her second, Folle from 2004, is described as "autofiction"; H. as a mixture of autobiographical and fictional components. The first novel was a finalist for both the Prix ​​Médicis and the Prix ​​Femina , the second for the Prix Femina alone. Since then, Arcan has written several short stories and columns for various newspapers and magazines and has appeared on Canadian Francophone radio and television. In 2007 A ciel ouvert followed as the third novel and L'enfant dans le miroir as an illustrated book on the subject of beauty .

Three weeks before her death, Arcan published a detailed story about a stalking experience in her column Prends-moi, ou t'es mort ( Take me or die! ) In the alternative weekly Ici, which appeared between 1997 and 2009 . Since Arcan said little about her private life and her next plans even in the time of her literary success, the reality of this story remains unclear. On September 24, 2009, she was found dead in her Montreal apartment, immediately after completing the manuscript of her last book Paradis, Clef en main . According to a police spokesman, the author committed suicide by hanging.

meaning

While Arcan was famous in the predominantly francophone province of Québec, she was largely unknown in the English-speaking rest of Canada, despite the appearance of all your books in English translations. This pattern was repeated in Europe. In France she was nominated for literary prizes, in the rest of Europe she was largely ignored: Her last works were neither published in Russian, German, Italian, Spanish nor in any of the other, smaller literary languages ​​of Europe. Hardly any other writer succeeded like Nelly Arcan in expressing the intensity of human emotions so directly and poignantly in words. Again and again she addressed death, so that her tragic suicide seems like a logical consequence of her works. Her style is pleasantly clear, direct, unaffected and does without the usual verbal mannerisms. This may explain why it was largely ignored by the German-speaking literature business.

Works

  • Le poids des mots, ou La matérialité du langage dans Les mémoires d'un névropathe de Daniel Paul Schreber ( The weight of words or the materiality of language in the memorabilia of a nervous patient by Daniel Paul Schreber ). master thesis
  • Putain , 2001 (German whore , transl. Holger Fock, Sabine Müller. CH Beck, Munich 2002; also as blind printing at the German Blind Study Institute , 2005)
  • Folle , 2004 (German Hörig , transl. Brigitte Große , 2005)
  • A ciel ouvert , 2007
  • L'enfant dans le miroir , 2007
  • Paradis, clef en main , 2009

Others

After a railway accident in 2013 caused severe damage in the center of Lac-Mégantics, her hometown, the newly built communal media center was named after Nelly Arcan in 2014.

literature

  • Christine Michel: Malaise dans l'érotisme. Representations of sexual practices and forms in contemporary French-language literature. Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Bern 2010 ISBN 3899757149
  • Marguerite Paulin, Marie Desjardins: Nelly Arcan. De l'autre côte du miroir. Les éditeurs réunis LÉR, Québec 2011 ISBN 2895851700
  • Thomas Hettche : The new chastity of pornography. Liberated bodies: Why the literature on sexual arousal has reached its presumed end, FAZ , January 21, 2003
  • Patricia Smart: Writing Herself into Being. Quebec Women's Autobiographical Writings from Marie de l'Incarnation to Nelly Arcan. McGill Queen's University Press , 2017

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ a b Nelly Arcan se serait suicidée , cyberpresse.ca. September 26, 2009. 
  2. ↑ a b Biographical information under the responsibility of her literary agent Marilène Bélanger , accessed on May 5, 2016.
  3. ↑ http://www.zeit.de/2005/42/L-Wolfe , book review in the time.
  4. ^ Statement by Arcan colleague Pierre Thibeault to the CBC on September 25, 2009 , accessed on May 5, 2016.
  5. ^ Commemorative article in The Globe and Mail of September 10, 2012, accessed May 5, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Arcan, Nelly
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fortier, Isabelle (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 5th 1973
PLACE OF BIRTH Lac-Mégantic
DATE OF DEATH September 24, 2009
Place of death Montreal