interview
Status: 06.10.2022 3:46 p.m
She was his “heart candidate” for the Nobel Prize in Literature – says the critic Scheck im daily News-Interview about Annie Ernaux. She has such a ruthless and personal style and is therefore important for many young authors.
tagesschau.de: Mr. Scheck, were you surprised by the award for Annie Ernaux?
Denis Check: No not true. Ernaux has been traded fairly high for the Nobel Prize in Literature for several years. And I have to admit: I was delighted when I heard this decision, because she was my favorite candidate this year. That’s because she’s such an excellent, wise choice by the Swedish Academy, both aesthetically and politically. Your work is very important to so many other, younger authors. It’s like an aesthetic, literary beacon for future authors.
Dennis Check
Born in Stuttgart, he is one of the best-known literary critics in Germany. Already at the age of 13 he founded a literary agency and at 16 he was an honorary fellow at the writers’ house in Stuttgart. He translated numerous books from English and also wrote some of his own works. He moderates numerous radio and television programs “Lesenworth” in the SWR and “fresh off the press” in first and has already won numerous awards, such as the German Television Award or the Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Prize.
tagesschau.de: Why is Ernaux so important for you personally and for the literary scene?
Check: you I have given this author a very special place in my heart, in my mind and in my library. She once wrote in her diary: “I never wanted anything but love and literature.” And if I don’t find myself in those two sentences, then I don’t know what is.
Generally speaking, she has found a wonderful way to speak for herself, especially in this autobiographical novel, The Years. But she was still able to banish the navel-gazing, the revolving around one’s own ego in this literature – precisely by avoiding the ego form. She wrote “we” or “man” instead. So that leads to the fact that you question yourself a little, that you don’t think of yourself as the center of the world, but that you take your own life as an example for a sociological experience. And that’s why Annie Ernaux has so much to do with French sociology.
“Literary guiding star for future authors”, literary critic Denis Scheck on the Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux
tagesschau24 2:00 p.m., 6.10.2022
tagesschau.de: How would you describe your style, which is very unique?
Check: She is an author you can really read at any age. You can read them at twelve, you can read them at 92. It’s that famous accessibility in literature. You really don’t need to have a university degree to understand this.
But their literature is complex nonetheless, as complex as the experience of our lives. She does not reduce this complexity, especially not in her quite wonderful descriptions of the paths of destruction love can cut in bourgeois lives. Writing in this way makes it clear that one can be hard on oneself – but enormously considerate of the reader.
Her style is sometimes painful because she also speaks of events that literally get under your skin. For example, when she cites the event of an AIDS test she takes after having sex without a condom as an occasion to remember that she was pregnant before – and it was a horrible experience. It’s about a time, just 50 or 60 years ago, when the French state, trying to find out how to get an abortion on its own, firstly declared it illegal and secondly punished it with imprisonment.
tagesschau.de: She has also repeatedly raised politically sensitive issues. Is that also due to her biography?
Check: Ernaux is the great author of classicism, it has to be said quite clearly. She was born in Normandy in 1940, her parents had a grocery store and a pub there and were really struggling at the bottom of the subsistence level. And then they were also threatened by the new supermarkets, by the better pubs that were opening there. And the extent to which this biographical experience eroded her later, when she had a permanent job as a teacher, when she also made a career as an author in Paris – all of Ernaux’s books bear eloquent testimony to this.
“A Woman”, for example, the great book about her mother, or “Der Platz”, these are the books that had an enormous impact on other writers. Let’s think of today’s authors like Didier Eribon or others who are thinking about their place in French society, who are considering what kind of baggage homosexuality can be to find one’s place in society. And they actually all refer to Annie Ernaux, who found this wonderful language and can write so unpretentiously about herself.
tagesschau.de: Ernaux is now 82 years old, which means it took her a long time to get this Nobel Prize in Literature. You have met her personally. What impression did she make on you as a person?
Check: I got to know her together with her German translator Sonja Fink. Ernaux is a small, fragile woman, but she has a wonderful mischievousness on her neck, who, even at her age, is surrounded by an erotic flair, who has a humorous flash, a wink in her eye and who is not afraid of anything or anyone. In other words: Annie Ernaux is like getting to know Pippi Longstocking – I fell in love with her spontaneously.