It is of course very dubious to compare a novel with a song, a brilliant theory with a brave action, a picture with an architectural blueprint. And yet we, the expanded feature section of the FAS, allowed ourselves the fun again this year to gather a few people who particularly impressed us. And agreed who we thought was particularly outstanding. You can see the result here.
1st place: Annie Ernaux
Why didn't anyone ever mention that Annie Ernaux was funny? The 81-year-old French writer is regarded by the public as a very serious person, perhaps because she has been writing autobiographical books in clear and detached form about poverty, the inner conflict that triggers social advancement, and the lives of women for decades. None of this is true.
Annie Ernaux laughs a lot when you meet her, a lot, too. For example, when she recounts how she once said on a television program in the 1980s “Why should all this shit get stuck with women?”, It was about raising children - and the French women who back then wanted to pretend could they manage anything (children, job, exciting love life), looked very piqued. Annie Ernaux is happy about that to this day, she likes to imitate the indignant faces.
Annie Ernaux was born on September 1, 1940 in Lillebonne as an only child. One sister died before she was born. Her parents had a shop and café in Yvetot in Normandy, where the girl grew up. The father had originally worked as a farmhand, the daughter attended a girls' boarding school and was the first in her family to study at a university.
Shame became a defining feeling for her. Shame for their simple origins. When she started writing in the mid-1970s - she was married, had two sons and taught as a high school teacher - she felt this shame in her memory “as an archaeologist on her own behalf”. In a completely new form of autobiographical writing, she viewed herself from the outside and at the same time reflected the social conditions under which she had grown up. She did not write autobiographies, not even novels, but invented a form of autofiction that was literature, sociology and historiography all rolled into one.
This year, 21 years after the French original, “The Event” was published, a book about the drama of an abortion.
And the film adaptation by Audrey Diwan with the great actress Anamaria Vartolomei was awarded this year's best film at the Venice Festival.
Annie Ernaux's story, for us a queen among contemporary writers, has lost none of its urgency.
When the book came out, people tried to ignore it - now there is no getting around her books.
Annabelle Hirsch, Julia Encke
2nd place: Svetlana Tichanovskaya
If the world were fair, the Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tichanovskaya would have no place on this list, but a place in the government of her country.
But it is not.
Svetlana Tichanowskaja is not even allowed to live in her homeland.
She now lives in exile in Lithuania.
And their children cannot even see their father: Sergei Tichanowski has been in prison since the end of May 2020.
Before he was incarcerated, the Central Election Commission prevented Tichanowski from participating in the election - he was the actual presidential candidate.
Svetlana Tichanovskaya decided to do something;
something that any “loyal wife” would do, she explains again and again: she has taken his place.