Jacques Chessex; Leading Swiss writer and painter who won the Prix Goncourt
Hyfler/Rosner
Leading Swiss writer and painter who won the Prix Goncourt
Michael Carlson
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 6 December 2009 18.34 GMT
The Swiss writer Jacques Chessex, who has died, apparently
from a heart attack, aged 75, was the first non-French
citizen to win France's most prestigious literary prize, the
Prix Goncourt. The precise, sometimes austere beauty of his
prose often contrasted with the way he used it to delve into
stories of hidden cruelty, crime or passion. While he was
respected within Switzerland as a poet, painter and
essayist, as well as a novelist, his penchant for revealing
the darkly uncomfortable truths beneath the pristine surface
of Swiss society found him more than once at odds with the
communities in which he lived.
His neighbours in the Swiss village of Ropraz were offended
by his 2007 novel Le Vampire de Ropraz, published in Britain
as The Vampire of Ropraz by Bitter Lemon Press in 2008,
which examined a 1903 miscarriage of justice when a local
stable boy caught violating animals was convicted of a
series of brutal murders. Chessex wove elements of genre
fiction into his portrayal of a backward and repressed
society trying to cope with modern criminal horror. But he
made the crimes themselves seem an almost inevitable
outgrowth of Swiss rural isolation, Calvinist repression,
and intense social jealousy, and the obvious parallels to
the present were reminiscent of Arthur Miller's The
Crucible.
His most recent novel, Un Juif Pour L'Exemple, investigated
the 1942 killing of a Jewish cattle trader by Swiss Nazis in
Chessex's home town of Payerne, and became a national cause
celebre in a country still uncomfortable with the true
character of its neutrality during the second world war.
Bitter Lemon plan to publish it, entitled A Jew Must Die, in
February next year.
Chessex won the Goncourt in 1973 for his novel L'Ogre,
published in English translation as A Father's Love in 1975.
Detailing a brutal father-son relationship, it drew heavily
on his own experience. Chessex was born in Payerne, where
his father was a secondary school principal and strict
disciplinarian. He was also an etymologist, from which may
have sprung Chessex's love of precision in his poetry and
prose.
Chessex attended elementary school with the son of the Nazi
at the centre of Un Juif pour L'Exemple, then studied at the
Jesuit College St Michel in Fribourg, where, aged 17, he
founded a poetry magazine, Pays du Lac (Lake Country). His
first book of poetry, Le Jour Proche (The Next Day), was
published in Geneva in 1954. At Lausanne University he wrote
his dissertation on Francis Ponge, the poet and essayist who
might be described as a French William Carlos Williams.
The pivotal moment of Chessex's life was the trauma he felt
after his father killed himself in 1956. After three more
collections of poetry, his first novel, La T�te Ouverte (The
Open Head, 1962) won the Schiller prize; the recognition
helped him co-found the literary magazine Ecriture in 1964.
Still, he followed in his father's footsteps, and taught
French literature at Lausanne's Gymnasium.
After the success of L'Ogre, which opens with the death of
its protagonist, a teacher's father, he settled in Ropraz,
and produced more than 80 books, including 31 novels or
other fictions, 28 volumes of poetry, including Les Aveugles
du Seul Regard, which won the Prix Mallarm� in 1994, and a
number of children's books, one of which, Marie et le Chat
Sauvage, was published in English as Mary and the Wild Cat
in 1980.
In his 60s he began painting, receiving a number of major
exhibitions in Switzerland. He occupied a central position
within the French-speaking Swiss cultural world, active as a
critic and essayist, and was awarded the Prix Jean Giorno
for his life's work in 2007.
Chessex collapsed during a lecture at the Municipal Library
in Yverdon les Bains, discussing a play adapted from his
1967 novel La Confession du Pasteur Burg (The Confession of
Pastor Burg), an intense work dealing with the conflict
between desire and repressive institutions and laws. He had
just been asked to comment on the arrest of the film
director Roman Polanski.
Married three times, he is survived by his companion
Sandrine Fontaine, and two sons, Fran�ois and Jean. A new
novel, Le Dernier Cr�ne De M De Sade (The Last Skull of M De
Sade), is due to be published early next year.
. Jacques Chessex, writer, born 21 March 1934; died 9
October 2009