The bright days

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The bright days is a novel by Zsuzsa Bánk , which was published by S. Fischer in Frankfurt am Main in 2011 and had ten editions as a hardcover edition in the same year. In the SWR Best List in March 2011 the work in 4th place and in the years 2012 and 2013 ended the novel held for months # 1 on the mirror - bestseller fiction paperback.

The work bears the dedication “For Louise and Friedrich” and is about a trio of friends and about growing up. The story is told from the point of view of a first-person narrator who has been involved in this trio since childhood, with whom she lives in a strangely elegiac Germany - and at times in Rome .

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Therese (Seri) looks back on the days of her childhood and youth since the mid-1960s, which she initially spends in a small town called Kirchblüt near Heidelberg and later, together with her two childhood companions, Aja and Karl, temporarily in Rome.

Seri and Aja are friends when Karl joins them. From now on they form a group of three in which they live more or less closely together. The adults who belong to them also become friends, partly because one of the children does not seem to be as solidly positioned socially and economically as the other two. Seri, the narrator, is the only daughter of well-to-do freight forwarders, Aja's parents are artists who immigrated from Hungary in the course of events in 1956 , and Karl grows up as one of two sons in an architect's household. In addition to the place and time, the three youngsters are united by the fact that they like Évi, Aja's mother. Évi has a garden that surrounds her home outside the town and where the three friends spend a lot of time together. What they have in common is that something happened to each of them that upsets and changes them: Seri's father Hannes suddenly died shortly after she was born and her mother Maria discovered years later that her father had a lover in Rome; Ajas only learns as an adult that Évi is not her birth mother, and her father Zigi works as a trapeze artist in the circus, travels a lot and only visits once a year; Karl loses his younger brother, who one day was taken in a strange car and did not come back, which traumatizes him as much as his parents, who grow apart due to their grief.

Especially during the time of their three-person flat share in Rome, the friendship experienced some tensions and the three received a visit from their three mothers. At the end of the story, Karl returned to Rome as a photographer, Aja works as a doctor in the neonatology department of the local district hospital and the narrator, Seri, sometimes translates from Italian, but has taken over the management of her mother's shipping company.

Sections

Page numbers after the paperback edition

  • Circus girl, 7
  • Snow, 26
  • Zigi's summer, 41
  • For the first time Karl, 61
  • Reading, 83
  • Brothers, 105
  • Easter, 123
  • One year 135
  • Fathers, 179
  • Houses, 210
  • The banks of the Neckar, 229
  • Ice Dance, 257
  • Jacob's Confessions, 275
  • South, 315
  • Between rocks, 336
  • Cherry blossom, 356
  • City of Lies, 383
  • Dragonfly, 414
  • The hottest day of the year, 436
  • Homecoming, 436
  • On this side of the ocean, 463
  • Mothers, 507
  • Fall, 529

Interpretations

The central character of the novel is Évi Kalócs with a Hungarian name, and the actual starting point of the plot is the flight of an artist couple “from the rolling tanks from Budapest to the West”, says Gudrun Schuster in her review for Spiegelungen: Zeitschrift für deutsche Kultur und Geschichte Southeast Europe . With her “life that gets by without the blessings of the modern technological world, even without reading and writing,” Évi exerts a strong attraction on children and adults and is “the guarantee of a life in her crooked house and overgrown garden” full of spontaneity, creativity and naive ingenuity, which the adult in a modern civilized world has lost to a great extent ”. Schuster speaks of an authoritative first-person narrator who tells the story of growing up retrospectively and adds that the three friends grow up “practically without fathers”, without siblings “and are therefore closely tied to their mothers. Their friendship replaces everything they lack, which they are not aware of for a long time ”. The novel is designed as a lengthy process in which the late and subsequent effects of events are traced and it deals, among other things, with "the integration of outsiders into a community, of helpfulness, also auxiliary constructions, of culturalization through which the dignity of life is restored or can be preserved. "

Hubert Spiegel reviewed the work for the FAZ and localized a risk that was approached with great empathy, which firstly consists of the "most delicate, fragile figure in relationship geometry - the triangle", and secondly from the fragile perspective of a retrospective, in which the children's perspective The beginning is made up of “ingredients for a perfect world Schmonzette that doesn't shy away from circus and gypsy clichés.” Spiegel knows what to say about Karl that he “doesn't join the girls because they are happy and carefree, but rather because they are self-confident outsiders, marked by losses early on. "

style

Bánk writes in a beautiful and elegiac language and it suggests a childlike logic by lining up picture elements and repeating them as leitmotifs "in ever new contexts of action and sentence". The pictures are almost exclusively designed in the subjunctive and they are almost unreal pictures like those found in Eichendorff . Gudrun Schuster sees this as a picture veil that consists of carefree, exuberance and world trust and that is spread over things as a fabric in order to contrast “deception, jealousy, suffering and death in the adult world of the parents”. Schuster adds that the bright days are followed by dark ones, with “disappointments” for the adolescents. Little pictures that are faded in do not determine the action, but illuminate the background of the event, for example "the one of men playing chess in the city's famous Széchenyi baths or that of Budapest after the end of the war".

Zsuzsa Bánk works with a dramaturgy of slowness and takes time to portray childlike feelings of eternity. Changes over several decades would be introduced discreetly through carefully linked motifs. Dramatic effects are never created by simple acceleration and speed is alien to her narration, this is how Hubert Spiegel characterizes Zsuzsa Bánk's style at the beginning of his review and makes a strategic point: “Bánk does not want to overwhelm her reader. But does she want to lull him? "

The novel consists of life stories, truths and insights. Fragments from the past are repeatedly interwoven with the current narrative world. There are relationships, but no reflection on them, no psychological studies and no conversations or analyzes, writes Britta Langhoff in her review.

Despite all the losses, this work is enchanted by happiness, says Andreas Isenschmid , and the narrative style with its long, flowing sentences is incomparable. There is color, detail and image and the merging of these elements is gorgeous composed. The mood of the book is peculiar and the country, in which the action predominantly takes place, appears strange and elegiac: Germany.

Reviews (selection)

Awards

The audio book edition was awarded the German Audio Book Prize in 2012 in the category best interpreter ( Doris Wolters ) .

expenditure

  • Book: The bright days. Novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2011, ISBN 978-3-10-005222-3 , (first edition)
    • as paperback at: Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-596-51273-7 .
    • as e-book: Fischer E-Books, Frankfurt am Main, 2011, ISBN 978-3-10-400805-9 .
    • as audio book: authorized reading version, 6 CDs (407 min.). Speaker: Doris Wolters. Director: Corinna Zimber. Audiobook, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2011, ISBN 978-3-89964-427-2 .
    • E-audio book online edition: The bright days audio book OHG, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-89964-427-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In other and more extensive summaries there are some, e.g. B. Dieter Wunderlich, Zsuzsa Bánk: The bright days , dieterwunderlich.de , 2013
  2. ↑ a b Gudrun Schuster, Zsuzsa Bánk. The bright days [review], in: Spiegelungen: Zeitschrift für deutsche Kultur und Geschichte Südosteuropas , Volume 7 (2012), Issue 2, pp. 194–196.
  3. ↑ a b Hubert Spiegel, "Circus children, endless summers, bare feet in the tall grass: Zsuzsa Bánk balances daringly and with great narrative breath across the abysses of kitsch in her novel The bright days " (pdf), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 12, 2011
  4. ↑ Britta Langhoff, Zsuzsa Bank. The bright days ( memento of the original from March 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , literaturzeitschrift.de , September 7, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.literaturzeitschrift.de
  5. ↑ Andreas Isenschmid, The gravel paths of life. Zsuzsa Bánk's second novel The Bright Days is a book out of this world , Die Zeit , April 18, 2011