The writer Yael Inokai was born in Basel in 1989. Last week she received the Anna Seghers Prize for her third novel “Ein simpler Intervention” (Hanser Berlin).
SZ: What are you reading right now?
Yael Inokai: Again and again “La Bâtarde” by Violet Leduc. Leduc was the illegitimate child of a servant and the son of the house, from which the title of her autobiography is derived, because for her mother, for those around her and always for herself, Leduc was La Bâtarde throughout her life. Leduc was promoted by her contemporary Simone de Beauvoir, but with her working-class background she always remained an outsider. The autobiography is a stunner, radically and poetically telling of the life of a bisexual woman who lived feminism instead of just dreaming it up.
What was the last really good book you read?
“Call me Esteban” by Lejla Kalamujić. In the fragmentary novel, a woman tells about the early death of her mother, grandparents, the siege of Sarajevo and Mileva Marić’s grave. Grief and lesbian love are negotiated, there are cats, ghosts and a train to Belgrade that crosses three national borders and has to change locomotives three times. Marie-Luise Alpermann did a great job of translating Kalamujić’s calm language, rich in images and all its melancholic wit, into German.
Which book should be banned?
I don’t think much of bans, but some posthumously published diaries testify to the author’s wish that they should never be published – I’m thinking of that, for example Patricia Highsmith, which wrote something along the lines of: Hands off! One could have respected that.
What was the last thing you learned from which book that you didn’t know before?
A few years ago, Mariella Mehr, a very important political writer in Switzerland, made me familiar with the fate of those children who had been forcibly separated from their parents by the aid organization Pro Juventute and placed in homes. More was such a child herself and made this dark chapter of Swiss history the subject of her literary works and essays. I’m just rediscovering this knowledge in the new edition of her trilogy “Daskind – Brandzauber – Accused”.
First sentences are overrated, right?
A nice serve is impressive, of course, but it doesn’t make a game by a long shot. This also applies to first pages.
Why does literature so rarely talk about nurses (like you do in your current novel “A simple intervention”)?
It would be interesting to find out where this lack begins. Maybe there are manuscripts that don’t find a publisher because the nursing profession is seen as unliterary per se. This view certainly influences writers as well. The nursing profession is still strongly associated with female work, which generally receives little attention. Last but not least, grooming is something that creates uncomfortable feelings in us because it reminds us of our own vulnerability; “The Daughter” by Kim Hye-jin recently captured that very impressively.
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