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WORK TITLE: Perla
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BIRTHDATE: 6/30/1960
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NATIONALITY: French
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Brun_(writer)
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PERSONAL
Born June 30, 1960, in Paris, France.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author.
AWARDS:Prix Goncourt du premier roman, Prix France Culture-Télérama nomination, and Bourse de la Découverte nomination, Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco, all 2007, and Prix littéraire Québec-France Marie-Claire-Blais, 2009, all for Perla; Prix Écritures & Spiritualités, 2010, for Une prière pour Nacha; Prix Femina essai shortlist, 2015, for Novalis et l’âme poétique du monde.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Award-winning French author Frederic Brun is perhaps best known for his semi-autobiographical novella Perla, which draws for its inspiration on his mother’s experiences as a Polish Jew fleeing the Nazis during World War II. Captured and sent to Auschwitz, she is saved by a careless gesture from the notorious Nazi Josef Mengele and is placed among those allowed to live rather than those relegated to the gas chambers. Perla’s story becomes relevant for her son when, fifty years after Auschwitz, she dies at the same time that her son (the narrator, who is never named) learns that his wife is expecting their first child. “Perla is already far away, where she always wanted to be,” the narrator stated in Perla. “During her moments of distress, I often heard her whisper ‘I want to die.’ Her secrets, her depression, her moments of beauty remain her on earth.’
The narrator also begins to explore German poetry and literature, finding in them a beauty that belies the atrocities of the Holocaust. He singles out the work of the late eighteenth-century Romantic writer and philosopher Frederich von Hartenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis), who built his oeuvre after the loss of his beloved, Sophie von Kühn. (Brun’s works of literary criticism include a study of the German poet: Novalis et l’âme poétique du monde). A Publishers Weekly reviewer found “an appealing quality” in Perla “to the narrator’s quest to seek out truth and beauty even as he reckons with historical horror.” This “semiautobiographical novel,” concluded a reviewer on the University of Nebraska Press website, “considers the seemingly irreconcilable multiplicities of life—past and present, personal and collective, self and other.”
Perla becomes for the narrator an attempt to resolve these conflicts; by telling his mother’s story, his hopes for his son’s birth, and his appreciation for classic German literature, he hopes to understand Germany’s conflicted past and the conflict that exists inside him. “There are two Germanys,” the narrator states in the first few pages of Perla. “The one of camps and barbed wire contrasts with the one of fog-covered plains, orange sunsets, idealist poets, Novalis, Hölderin … who captured the soul of the world (Weltseele). Why am I so fascinated by this country torn between harmony and dissonance, refinement and barbarity? I am astonished to find within it both my favorite literature and the traces of a past that shattered Perla.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Brun, Frederic, Perla, translated by Sarah Gendron and Jennifer Vanderheyden, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, August 7, 2017, review of Perla, p. 49.
ONLINE
University of Nebraska Press Website, http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/ (March 21, 2018), author profile.
Frédéric Brun (writer)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Frédéric Brun and Brun (surname).
Frédéric Brun (born 30 June 1960, Paris) is a French writer, the author of a trilogy published by Stock which earned him several literary prizes, including the prix Goncourt du premier roman for Perla, as well as the one bestowed by the "Association Écritures et Spiritualités" for Une prière pour Nacha.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 Work
3 Prizes and distinctions
4 References
5 External links
Biography[edit]
In 2007, he published his first book Perla. Shortly after the death of his mother, Perla, deported fifty years earlier to the Auschwitz concentration camp, he tried to understand her ordeal and read numerous testimonies about the camps. Strangely at the same moment, he felt attracted by the German poets, Novalis, Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel and painter Caspar David Friedrich. A hymn to the mother, it is also a book of correspondence and questioning, on love, death, birth and transmission.[1]
In 2008, a second book was published: Le Roman de Jean. In this book, he retraces the journey of his father Jean Dréjac, author of songs, from fragments and rough drafts. After his disappearance, faced with questions about the afterlife, he finds an appeasement with the ancient philosophers.
In 2010, he completed a family trilogy with Une prière pour Nacha. Nacha suffers from Alzheimer's disease. At the moment when he was present at the end of her life, the narrator noticed that the story of his family's branch had not been told to him. He is going to make an investigation in Poland and thanks to a Yizker-bukh, a book of memory, he would get to know some details of the life of his ancestors. Une prière pour Nacha is a book of hope at the crossroads of religions.
In 2015, he published the biographical novel Novalis et l'âme poétique du monde and created the éditions Poesis. That same year, he was a member of the Prix Françoise Sagan.
In 2016, he conceived the design, the choice of texts and the foreword of the anthology Habiter poétiquement le monde (Poesis).
Work[edit]
2007: Perla, Stock, ISBN 9782234060272.
2008: Le Roman de Jean, Stock, ISBN 9782234060883.
2010: Une prière pour Nacha, Stock, ISBN 9782234063327.
2015: Novalis et l'âme poétique du monde, Poesis, ISBN 9782955211908.
Collaboration
2006: Jean Dréjac, Comme elle est longue à mourir ma jeunesse, éditions Christian Pirot, ISBN 2868082351.
2015: Poesie, réel absolu, fragments de Novalis (transl. Laurent Margantin), foreword, Poesis, ISBN 9782955211915.
2016: Habiter poétiquement le monde, anthologie-manifeste, Poesis, ISBN 9782955211922.
Prizes and distinctions[edit]
2007: Perla, winner of the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman; nominated for the Prix France Culture-Télérama and the "Bourse de la Découverte" of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco.
2009: Perla, winner of the Prix littéraire Québec-France Marie-Claire-Blais (fr) (Québec).
2010: Une prière pour Nacha, winner of the Prix Écritures & Spiritualités (fr).[2]
2015: Novalis et l'âme poétique du monde, in the final selection of the Prix Femina essai
Perla
Publishers Weekly. 264.32 (Aug. 7, 2017): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Perla
Frederic Brun, trans. from the French by Sarah
Gendron and Jennifer Vanderheyden. Univ. of
Nebraska, $17.95 trade paper (96p) ISBN 9781-4962-0102-7
In Brun's inquisitive novella, a son contemplates his mother's traumatic life while preparing for fatherhood and pursuing his own aesthetic education. The unnamed narrator's mother, Perla, was a Jewish Polish emigre to France and Auschwitz survivor, and her death , "open[s] new doors" for the narrator, who resolves to explore her secrets and "moments of beauty [that] remain here on earth." The narrator imagines his mother's wartime years--her deportation to Auschwitz, her encounters with Josef Mengele--in scenes that are harrowing and restrained. Reeling from his mother's death and ecstatic over his arriving child, he immerses himself in German Romanticism, specifically in the bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, looking for some key to his range of intense, contradictory feelings and to a German culture "torn between harmony and dissonance, refinement and barbarity." In these essayistic sections, the prose aims for the sublime but often seems merely inflated ("A majestic maple tree keeps vigil over my PowerBook, asking only to blossom open like a white flower") or portentous ("T is a shadow. Literature is the portrait of shadows."). Nonetheless, there is an appealing quality to the narrator's quest to seek out truth and beauty even as he reckons with historical horror. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Perla." Publishers Weekly, 7 Aug. 2017, p. 49. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500340325/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=879c53df. Accessed 3 Mar. 2018.
Perla is the story of a woman who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust and would ultimately die unable to extricate herself from its corrosive memory. It is told from the point of view of her son, who, not long after losing her, learns that he is about to become a father. These two events become the impetus for reconstructing Perla’s past and for understanding gestation, as he’s equally in the dark about what happened in his mother’s life and what is taking place in his wife’s womb. Strangely, at this time he finds himself drawn to the poets Novalis, Hölderlin, and Schlegel, and the painter Caspar David Friedrich—founders of German romanticism who strove to capture the spiritual essence of the world. With and through them, he seeks peace and grapples with the question: How could Germany produce both the purest poetry and the most complete barbarity?
Winner of France’s Goncourt Prize for a first novel, Frédéric Brun’s semiautobiographical novel considers the seemingly irreconcilable multiplicities of life—past and present, personal and collective, self and other, life and death.