Winner of the Grand Prix Literature Anna Felder dies
Published: Thursday, Nov 16th 2023, 16:00
Updated At: Thursday, Nov 16th 2023, 16:03
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The author Anna Felder was one of the most thoughtful and highly decorated voices in Swiss literature. She died on Wednesday evening at the age of 85, as confirmed by her personal entourage in a report by SRF Kultur to Keystone-SDA.
At first glance, Anna Felder's books may seem inconspicuous. In "La disdetta" (German: "Auszug durch die Katzentür") from 1974, for example, she tells the story of four people who have to leave their home. But the story is narrated by a cat who says in the very first sentence: "They thought I was a cat". This stirs up skepticism and irritation.
The author prefers to turn to inconspicuous events and encounters. But her prose repeatedly lets readers fall into the trap of false expectations. "There are so many invisible things happening behind the everyday that are mysterious and worth the effort of investigating and questioning," she said in an interview with Keystone-SDA in 2018.
Despite such traps and pitfalls, Anna Felder's prose reads as light as a feather. Every word, every sentence sounds logical and comprehensible. But then an impertinent subjunctive, an unexpected gap or a treacherous shift throws everything slightly out of kilter.
"I write slowly"
Such idiosyncrasies indicate that Felder approached her work at her desk with deliberation. "I write very slowly, half a page is often a lot in one day," with the effect that what I have written is then "almost definitive," she said. Felder leaves behind a comparatively small body of work: four novels, numerous short stories and a few radio plays and plays.
She was born in Lugano in 1937, the daughter of a Swiss-German father and an Italian mother. She studied Romance languages and literature in Zurich and Paris and settled in Aarau after completing her doctorate. She taught at the cantonal school there and lived there for decades, traveling to Ticino from time to time until old age.
In her debut novel "Quasi Heimweh", she incorporates experiences from her first time as a teacher. It was published in the early 1970s against the backdrop of the xenophobic Schwarzenbach Initiative and is therefore politically explosive. The novel is about a young Italian teacher who follows her brother from Italy to Aargau, where she is supposed to familiarize the children of Italian immigrants in the villages with the Italian language and culture.
Like the young teacher in the novel, the author Felder also alternated between Italian and German. While German was spoken outside, she herself wrote in Italian inside. This commuting was important to her, she said in the Keystone-SDA interview, also to gain critical distance from her familiar mother tongue. On the one hand, she loves its "sounds, the A, O and I", on the other hand, she appreciates the "beautiful compounds" in German, said Felder.
"find your own rhythm"
She wrote prose with the means of poetry; musicality was important. "This means that before I can capture a sentence on paper, I have to find my own rhythm," she explained. Sound and rhythm take on "an almost material meaning in every sentence".
This sensuality can be felt particularly well in her latest collection of stories "Circolare" (2018), the original title of which is "Liquida" (2017). The sentences flow and draw the reader involuntarily into a spinning circle.
Anna Felder is a moving storyteller who does not aim for sensationalism, but rather for sensibility. She has received numerous prizes and awards for her work. In 2018, the Federal Office of Culture (BAK) honored her life's work with the Grand Prix Literature, Switzerland's most prestigious literary prize.
But perhaps the greatest honor was bestowed on her in 1973 by Italian author Italo Calvino. In response to the manuscript of "La Disdetta", he wrote to her: "One cannot hope that the book will captivate a wide audience, because almost nothing happens on the level of the story." Something else is important: "However, it has a humor, a cool look that I greatly appreciate". That's why Anna Felder's prose is worth reading even after her death.
©Keystone/SDA
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