Anne Weber, a German writer living in France, translates her books into French herself. From there a unique work is born, which will be rewarded on Sunday May 12 as part of the 46th Solothurn Literary Days which began on May 10.
What is close to us is often stranger than an exotic destination, writes Anne Weber in her latest book “Bannmeilen” (“Banning Lines”), released this year in German and not yet published in French. Barely an hour’s walk from his Parisian home begins the suburbs, the infamous 9-3, as the Seine-Saint-Denis department is also called. Thierry, a friend, suggests that they explore it together.
During their wanderings, they discover an inhospitable area, plowed by highways between which stand abandoned rental buildings and warehouses. At first glance, there are only people here who hurry and few places which invite you to linger.
Marks of History
But there is another side of the story. The narrator and her companion come across an oasis on a side street. Rachid’s little café becomes their refuge. Here, 9-3 takes on another face, people and their stories are revealed. Those who live here often have no choice. “Left and never arrived”, these people live “between two elsewhere”. “Bannmeilen” is also a social report.
Speaking of this suburb, Anne Weber evokes the marks left by the Algerian War (1954-1962) and the convoys of Jews which, from 1940, left the 9-3 in the direction of Auschwitz.
At the crossroads of languages
Anne Weber has thirteen books of very different genres to her credit. At the same time, she translates authors like Wilhelm Genazino and Birgit Vanderbeke into French or, conversely, Cécile Wajsbrot, Eric Chevillard or Georges Perros into German.
The 59-year-old writer who shares her life with Antoine Jaccottet, the son of the Genevan poet Philippe Jaccottet, wrote her first novel “Ida invents the powder” (1998) in French before translating it into German.
She is pleased, today, to have spontaneously written her first novel in a language other than her own, she said in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde: “It caused a transformation of reality, a distortion . Ida is me, but with a fairly large distance due to the use of a language which remains foreign If there is no distance between oneself and what one writes, between oneself and the world. language deployed, there can be story, testimony, but not literature, I believe.
His latest book in French “Annette, an epic” is a biography of the neuroscientist, communist and Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) activist, Anne Beaumanoir. This work in its Germanic version was awarded the German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis) at the 2020 Frankfurt Book Fair.
Born in Offenbach am Rhein (D) in the Frankfurt region, Anne Weber went to study French and comparative literature at the Sorbonne in Paris in the early 1980s. She never returned to Germany.
ats/olhor
Solothurn Literary Days, May 10-12, 2024.
