The Swiss writer Jacques Chessex [...] 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 Tête 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 Mallarmé 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,
François and Jean. A new novel, Le Dernier Crâne De M De Sade (The Last
Skull of M De Sade), is due to be published early next year.
(The Guardian)
