Patatini
Patatini. The story of an original is a story by Ricarda Huch , which was probably written during the Trieste period (1898–1899).
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The first-person narrator remembers the celebration of his 20th birthday. Back then, the narrator's father had played farce after farce to a good friend, the Catholic priest Don Vincenzo, and laughed so heartily every time. His father - a merchant - had found life almost desolate when he could not make any of his jokes at the expense of the priest Don Vincenzo for a long time. The narrator calls Don Vincenzo the oldest, best and most inseparable friend in his parents' house. The mother had liked to see the clergyman and the father had always been amused as soon as this visitor came, but he had ridiculed him. Don Vincenzo had made a fool of himself every time. Usually the father got overboard. In all such cases Don Vincenzo had made up again afterwards.
The father had given his friend the nickname Patatini (Italian: patatina - potato) - stupid as a potato. He hadn't meant stupidity by that, but absent-mindedness that had come to light again and again if some joke was not recognized in time.
For example, Patatini never parted with his precious walking stick, which had a knob in the form of an ornately decorated small globe. During one of Patatini's visits to the narrator's parents' house, his father cunningly stole the cane and stubbornly maintained that Patatini had left the utensil somewhere else. The joke dragged on. There was no end in sight. With fictitious letters, sent by business friends of the father from all over the world, the father lured the priest a hundred francs for the handover of the stick , thereby paying the costs for the above-mentioned birthday party.
The bad jokes his father allowed himself with good old Patatini had been quite a few. With the last one, the father pretended to be sick, confined to bed by illness. Patatini fell for it, of course, and hurried over.
A few weeks later, the father received news that his friend was ill. Because he did not want to fall for the clumsy reply to the joke, the father stayed away from Patatini's sick bed. By the time he finally made himself comfortable because he wanted to mock his friend, Patatini had long since died.
Book editions
- Ricarda Huch: The Gold Island and other stories. Selected and provided with an afterword by Wolfgang Brekle (contains: The Gold Island . The Huguenot . Devils . Patatini. Fra Celeste . The end of the world . The Jewish grave . The last summer ). Union Verlag, Berlin 1972 (Licensor: Atlantis Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau and Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main), 376 pages (edition used)
Web links
in English
- Entry in Open Library
- Entry in WorldCat
- Entry in Munseys Magazine
- Entry in the library of the University of Wisconsin – Madison
- Helen Chambers: Humor and Irony in Nineteenth-Century German Women's Writing Studies in Prose fiction 1840-1900, p. 176, 14. Zvo
Individual evidence
- ↑ Brekle in the afterword of the edition used, p. 362, 3rd Zvu