Yannick Haenel
Yannick Haenel (born September 23, 1967 in Rennes ) is a French writer .
life and work
Born the son of a military man, Haenel spent some time in sub-Saharan Africa and later attended the Prytanée national militaire in La Flèche , a French cadre school, for three years . Later, in his first novel Les Petits Soldats ( The Little Soldiers , 1996) , the author describes the bleak coexistence behind the thick walls of this school, far from real life, but also the discovery of solitude and, above all, literature. In the years that followed, Haenel turned to studying literature, which he passed with the Agrégation . He then taught French for 17 years, including in the so-called problem areas of the Parisian banlieue, in Villiers-le-Bel and Mantes-la-Jolie .
In 1997 he founded the magazine Ligne de risque (risk line) together with the writer François Meyronnis .
In 2001, Introduction à la mort française was published ( Introduction to the French Death ). Jean Deichel, Haenel's alter ego , escapes from the ominous Villa Blanche , a kind of institute for writers who eke out their existence there in complete alienation. The figure of the writer Maurice Blanchot (Villa Blanche) seems to have been of central importance in the writing and with it Haenel's own liberation from the clutches of a literature of inner destruction and hopelessness. In some grotesque images, the author lets the inglorious and repressed history of France haunt the inhabitants of Paris . Blood rushes from the mouth of the French president as he speaks, the Seine has turned into a bloody river of corpses that overflows and inundates the entire city.
The story Evoluer parmi les avalanches ( Walk between avalanches) begins in a metro compartment above the Seine. It is September 12, 2001, one day after the attacks in New York: Deichel got stuck with the metro on the Bir-Hakeim Bridge. A woman is sitting and reading the newspaper. On the cover picture, Haenel recognizes the photo of a man who throws himself to his death from the World Trade Center. Deichel, who turned the photo upside down, interprets the suicide as a leap “to heaven”, comparable to Yves Klein's The Leap into the Void from 1960. A quote from Blaise Pascal's thoughts finally prompts Deichel to redesign his life. From now on he lives on the top floor of a nearby high-rise to write. “Qu'y at-il dans le vide qui puisse nous faire peur?” Asks Pascal. "What is there in nowhere that could frighten us?"
In 2005 Haenel gave up his job as a French teacher. In the same year a number of publications appear, including an essay. The Collectif Ligne de risque , created in collaboration with François Meyronnis, is a collection of conversations a. a. with the sinologist François Jullien and the French Heidegger specialist Gérard Guest. Poker includes conversations between Haenels and Meyronni with the writer Philippe Sollers , who is also their publisher. In A mon seul désir (the title that discussed is Millefleurs -Wandbehang borrowed and means something like: "My only desire") do Haenel in the footsteps of Rainer Maria Rilke on the mystery of the Lady with the unicorn in the Paris Musée du nationally Moyen Âge to ventilate.
The author made his breakthrough in 2007 with his award-winning novel Cercle , about a man who one day decides to stop going to work, breaks away from other people and strolls through Paris. This experience of freedom gives him access to a peculiar phenomenon , writes Haenel, - the event - in which both the secret of enjoyment and that of the destruction that dominates the world are concentrated. In the further course the narrator is drawn to Berlin, from where he travels to Warsaw and from there explores Central Europe. Haenel received the Prix Décembre and the Prix Roger Nimier for Cercle in 2007 .
In 2009, with Prélude à la délivrance (Prelude to Redemption) , another book was published in collaboration with Meyronnis, this time about the sacred, depicted using Melville's Moby Dick , with articles also about Warlam Tichonowitsch Schalamow and Paul Celan .
From 2008 to 2009 Haenel stayed as a guest in the Académie de France à Rome in the Villa Medici in Rome.
In early 2011, Le sens du calme, an autobiographical attempt in 17 chapters, was published. Each chapter deals with a crucial experience for the author on which his writing is based. Haenel also sees his book as a possible answer to some readers' question: why are you writing?
In 2017 Haenel's novel Tiens ferme ta couronne was published , in which, after Introduction à la mort française and Cercle, he again referred to Jean Deichel as the narrator. Haenel's alter ego loses his apartment in Paris and is inspired by the desire to convince the American director Michael Cimino to make a film adaptation of his screenplay about Herman Melville . This is followed by a series of adventures that range from Paris to New York to Italy. In the year of its publication, Tiens ferme ta couronne made it into the final four novels for the Prix Goncourt and was awarded the Prix Médicis 2017.
"Jan Karski. Roman" (2009)
Haenel's book Jan Karski about the legendary courier of the Polish Home Army was published in September 2009 . For this work he was honored with the Prix du roman Fnac and the Prix Interallié .
Haenel's text is expressly referred to as "novel" in the subtitle. It consists of three parts: the first refers to the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann and his conversation with Karski in 1978, thus describes the image that Karski gave the French director of himself. The second part is a summary of Karski's autobiography, his self-image, the publication of which in 1944 caused Karski to remain silent about his experiences for decades. In the third part, Haenel invents a Karski who, in the form of an internal monologue, ponders why the Allied governments did not help European Jews and did nothing to prevent the Holocaust .
Haenel was criticized for this “intuitive fiction” of the third part. In a statement, the writer referred to artistic freedom and to the fact that "the recourse to fiction [...] is not just a right", but "necessary here, since we know almost nothing about Karski's life after 1945, except that he was silent for 35 years ”. In January 2010, Lanzmann made violent attacks against Haenel on charges of “plagiarism” and “falsifying history and its actors”.
bibliography
- Les Petits Soldats . Roman, La Table ronde, 1996. La Petite Vermillon again, 2004
- Introduction à la mort française . Roman, Gallimard, coll. L'Infini, Paris 2001
- Voluer parmi les avalanches . Novel. Gallimard, coll. L'Infini, Paris 2003
- À mon seul désir . Argol, 2005
- Ligne de risque, sous la direction de Yannick Haenel et François Meyronnis . Gallimard, coll. L'Infini, Paris 2005
- Poker, Entretiens de la revue Ligne de risque avec Philippe Sollers . Gallimard, coll. L'Infini, Paris 2005
- Cercle . Novel. Gallimard, coll. L'Infini, Paris 2007
- Prelude à la délivrance . Gallimard, coll. L'Infini, Paris 2009
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Jan Karski. Novel. Gallimard, Paris 2009
- Translator Claudia Steinitz: The silence of Jan Karski. Rowohlt, 2012
- Le sens du calme . Mercure de France, Paris 2009
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Les renards pâles . Gallimard, Paris 2013
- Translator Claudia Steinitz: The pale foxes. Rowohlt, 2014
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Tiens ferme ta couronne . Gallimard, Paris 2017
- Translator Claudia Steinitz: Hold your crown tight. Rowohlt, 2019
Web links
- Berlin is Europe's navel made of concrete , Haenel in conversation, Café Babel
- Tilmann Krause: "I'm not interested in the executioners" , in: Die Welt , April 26, 2010
notes
- ^ Biography of Yannick Haenel. Retrieved August 7, 2019 .
- ↑ Steinitz in the translator database of the VdÜ , 2019
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Haenel, Yannick |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French author |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 23, 1967 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rennes |