Authors & Books
Charles Ofaire
Biography
Charles Ofaire, bilingual (see below) author, critic, journalist and essayist from the jurassic borderland between France and Switzerland, is an author of novels like »Pour elle seule« and »Jesalé«, as well as of plays like »La céne de mére« and »Der letzte Auftritt des Herrn Mercier«.
Charles Ofaire has translated Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka into French, and Barbey d’Aurevilly and Charles Nodier into German. He was involved in commenting and editing the nine-volume edition of the »Correspendance Générale« of Barbey. – Among several publications on french literature and music, he also has done some directing, like: »La Damnation de Faust« by Hector Berlioz.
Charles Ofaire is a member of Société des Ecrivains Normands and was decorated with the Prix Barbey d’Aurevilly, the Palmes Académiques and the Légion d’Honneur.
Bern's lost childhood
Novel of the city Bern between 1900 and 1950
- 288 pages
- Series Die Hauptwerke
- Hardcover with satin book ribbon
978-3-86638-144-5
The novel »Bern's lost childhood« is the story of a Bernese family in the social, cultural and political context of Swiss and Europe between 1900 and 1950 with retrospects of a commentator from the end of the 20th century.
Several figures escape to USA, France and Germany – or even further, to the Orient.
The urban novel (in which Bern is for the first time really in the center of attention of a enormous literary plot) is also a stead novel, which surprises the reader with new kinds of reporting and introduces an unusual and unemotional Bernese legend in the European compound. Such is hitherto unknown, but has its sound charms!
The fact that also the Karlsruhe of World War II belongs to the capitals of the novel shows that the reader is not safe from surprises with Charles Ofaire.
The book was introduced by Charles Ofaire in Germany, supported by the two actors Franziska Knetsch and Helmut Keuchel, by the Kulturverein Strömungen in Marburg together with the bookshop Roter Stern and Manfred Paulsen. In Swiss the first presentation took place in Bern – where else!? – with the bookshop Libromania.
Ich, die Fransentochter
Novel, a quiet diary of the year 1989
- 144 pages
- Series Die Hauptwerke
- Hardcover with satin book ribbon
978-3-86638-148-3
In the year 2009 Charles Ofaire's first novel »Berns verlorene Kindheit« was published and gained nice attention. Now Ofaire presents a second novel, which is set in and around Marburg. He depicts the fate of a woman, who starts a new life after a mastectomy. »Ich, die Fransentochter« is initially arranged in the style of a diary and in a manner it is a extremely tough piece of literature: It has a female figure as protagonist, who suffers from cancer and still as an adult suffers from the early loss of her father. The narrative time is the year 1989 – the protagonist's inner dams are breaking in parallel to the historic ones during the fall of the Berlin Wall, the personal riot recognizes its echo in the peaceful, but determined departure of the citizens of the GDR. Finally, she starts the quest for her missing father in France, gets into the Franco-German involvements from World War II times – however, she opens herself paths und personal fate and contemporary history intertwine at various levels. The reader of this dense book will be rewarded for many severities and irritating bluntnesses with that clarity, which some people unfortunately only gain from calamities ...