Alfred and Emily

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Alfred and Emily (in the original Alfred and Emily ) is a work by Doris Lessing from 2008, the last work by the Nobel Prize winner . It has a new hybrid form: part narrative, part notebook, part memoir. The book is based on the biographies of Lessing's parents. The first part is a fictional description of how her parents' life could have been if it had n't been for the First World War . The second part tells how her parents' life really was. Alfred and Emily testify to Lessing's continued interest in formal experiments. In the middle of the book, style and tone are changed. The work has received a lot of international attention and has evoked diverse descriptions of reading experiences in reviews as well as in research literature.

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Contemporary view of the Royal Free Hospital, Gray Inn's Road, London. In the first part of the book, World War I is banished and Emily does not have to treat dying soldiers in the Royal Free.
St. George's Hospital, London, where Emily McVeagh was offered a position as head nurse in 1916 at the age of only 32; Illustration from 1836

The first part begins in England in 1902 when Alfred and Emily meet at a game of cricket. The story goes until 1916, but contrary to the actual course of life, the couple did not marry. The fact that there is no war in this fictional portrait means that Alfred will be spared the war wounds that cripple him, and Emily will be spared the agony of tending to the soldiers in the hopeless role of a nurse, sometimes without the use of morphine Hand was. Instead, the couple thrive separately. Alfred becomes a farmer and spends a happy life with Betsy. Emily marries a doctor, but he dies early and, as a childless, wealthy widow, she uses her financial resources to build schools for children from poor families. At the end of Part 1 there is an explanatory section from the author's point of view, followed by two portraits of the same man and an encyclopedic entry about a London hospital. This is followed by a photo in the hospital room showing a patient and a nurse.

In the second part, Alfred and Emily find themselves in the phase of their married life in which they unsuccessfully run a farm in Southern Rhodesia . A series of episodes from Lessing's childhood explain how Lessing's unhappiness came about. Both Emily and Alfred have to struggle with the consequences of their traumatization from the First World War and it shapes everyday family life . The consequences of the Second World War and the Rhodesian Liberation War (Rhodesian liberation war) can also be felt, especially in the life of Lessing's brother, Harry.

Interpretations

In Alfred and Emily , Lessing does not free herself so much from the story, but rather goes into the middle, because the book is just as much about her parents as she is, says Susan Watkins in her Lessing study from 2010. Lessing's work since 2000 implies that fictional writing can be more fruitful than factual writing, insofar as it gives individuals and nations the opportunity to understand the past, Watkins continues, and this idea is embodied in Alfred and Emily by making the first part speculative and the second “a memoir.” On the basis of her interpretation of Lessing's work The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2006), Watkins even goes so far as to say: “Lessing's work in this period strongly suggests [. ..] that official histories are flawed and imperfect. "

In his review for The Guardian , Tim Adams describes the work as "perfectly crafted" and as "a quietly extraordinary meditation on family". He adds that a writer always lives in such a space as is created here between the first and the second part. Kathy Watson appreciatively comments on the double perspective with which Lessing skilfully treats the contradictions in Emily's personality: on the one hand collapsed, wailing and suffering, but from a child's perspective terrifying, angry and puzzling. In the New York Times , Caryn James states that Lessing is pursuing her fixed idea of ​​alternative realities with this book and that the project as a whole is more revealing than one of the parts taken in isolation, insofar as it documents that Lessing, at 88 years of age, still grimly grappling with the meaning of her parents' lives. James ends with words of praise: with their generosity and composed anger, Alfred and Emily are also an extraordinary and unconventional addition to Lessing's autobiography. Valerie Sayers writes in The Washington Post that Alfred and Emily demonstrate Lessing's continued interest in formal experimentation, and in this case, find two sophisticated formats. Sayers welcomes the work as a clever combination of fiction and non-fiction, the effect of which is that Lessing gives her readers an insight into the connection between autobiography and narrative, between form and content. In this way Lessing confirms the power and possibilities of storytelling. Frank Kermode describes the two parts of the book as “two separate narratives”, “the first fictional” (“a counterfactual imagining”), “the second autobiographical”, but sees a common theme: “a preoccuation with the destructive impact of war on ordinary happiness. "Franz Birkenhauer read Alfred and Emily as a legacy, also" to all the innumerable people of the twentieth century [who fared like Alfred and Emily and their children [,] and about whom no books are written. "

Relationship between the two parts

There is no agreement about the importance of the structure of the work, nor about which part is more worth reading. From the point of view of Susan Williams, Alfred and Emily consist of two parts, rather they are two books. The first part is a novella in which she describes the life of her parents, and the second is based on facts. In the first part, Lessing abolished the First World War and the second stood in contrast to this. While the first part is an easily readable story, the second part has no clear framework and seems incoherent and nervous. Bernadette Conrad sees it the other way round in her appraisal. The first part is too flat and the second is a valuable piece of literature that deserves attention because Lessing is here again in a masterly manner in dealing with the topics that she has dealt with for many years. And she does so with a loving gesture towards her otherwise hated mother. Conrad finds it remarkable that it is not in the imaginary part of the book where Lessing succeeds in this rehabilitation, but in the second part, where she remembers the actual life of her mother. In the first part, Emily is drawn with viscous paint, says Virginia Tiger, which can be traced back to her ominously complex character: She could have been unbearably sentimental, was nevertheless able to drown kittens and at the age of 32 had a job as Got offered head nurse at St. George's Hospital. In Part 1, Emily is thrown out at home because she does not want to go to university: "But Emily was starting work as the lowest of the low, this coming week, at the Royal Free Hospital in the Gay's Inn Road in London" ( Alfred and Emily , P. 8). Like Williams, Tiger thinks that the first part is hardly conclusive, even wooden, and the style of the prose is unnerving, if not tangled. Watkins wonders which part of Lessing feels more liberating and she comes to the conclusion that it is precisely the creative interplay between “the fictionalized part” and “memoir” that enables the author to create a “talking / writing cure” .

Blake Morrison finds Alfred and Emily unusual because it is fiction and factual text at the same time and the same story is told in two different ways, as if dice had been thrown twice ("a double throw of the dice"). Also Denis Scheck says that the story of Alfred and Emily a second time will tell and then autobiographical. He thinks it is a bold idea that Lessing changes style and tone in the middle of the book.

Hybrid form

Tiger emphasizes that the hybrid form of the book is new, a triptych in terms of form : narrative, notebook and memoir. This is preceded by a foreword in which the author explains the intention of the tripartite division. The notebook is one of Lessing's famous formats that is reminiscent of her classic The golden notebook from 1962. Here in Alfred and Emily , the function of the notebook is to cover the imaginative straw ceiling of the first part with a varnish. Tiger finds Alfred and Emily confusing because there are two more sections: an encyclopedic entry and an epigraph. In addition, Tiger considers the photos (“the Tayler family album photos”), especially that of Emily as a nurse at St. George's Hospital, and believes that facts and fiction do not blur, but rather bleed into one another (“fact and fiction do not so much blur as bleed into one another "). Tiger agrees with Conrad when she writes that the first part hardly seems coherent and rather wooden and that its prose is powerless if not confused. She finds the first part unconvincing also for the reason that there the flow of the narrative is interrupted by anticipatory remarks.

David Sergeant thinks that it is an amalgam in which the two parts assimilate a whole range of other elements, namely a foreword and a coda to Part 1, an explanation by the author as to whether or not what is told is based on facts, a long excerpt from an encyclopedia on London and a selection of grainy photographs. With all of this, Lessing moves back and forth through different times, regions and topics. It works, because “the novel - or is it biography? - or is it history? “Is held together by Lessing's voice. Literary works are normally encapsulated by genre conventions and Lessing breaks them. To be able to perceive the cumulative effect of these events and their sequence, one has to “tune” one's ears for the fictional, says Sergeant.

Other aspects

Roberta Rubenstein highlights another structural aspect by saying that the last two sections of the book are unique because they are to be understood as appendices after the reconciliation process. Judith Kegan Gardiner is of the opinion that Lessing in this work is deliberately targeting the tendency of readers to equate narratives with autobiography. And she's doing it even more conspicuously here than in the golden notebook . If it were up to WM Hagen, the title of the book would have to be Emily and Alfred or just Emily , because it is much more about the mother than the father, or even just about Lessing's search for the other woman in her mother Emily. Presumably Lessing only chose the book title on the basis of conventions of the generation of her parents or her own.

Emergence

In the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), Lessing writes that she would have liked the idea of ​​writing a book about herself called My Alternative Lives . In it she would have been a doctor, a veterinarian, a farmer, an explorer, and lived this out in different universes and realities, parallel to her own writing self. Lessing implemented this idea in a modified form with Alfred and Emily .

reception

For the New York Review of Books , Tim Parks places Alfred and Emily in the context of other “family memoirs” and in the same article discusses another four works by Marie Brenner ( Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found , 2008), by Rachel Sontag ( House Rules , 2008), by Miranda Seymour ( Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in my Father's House , 2007) and by Isabel Allende ( The Sum of Our Days , 2007). Parks sums up that Lessing's Alfred and Emily are characterized by their kind of anger and political engagement. Lessing's main interest here is less in the family than in a passionate anti-war position. You can expect to be admired for it by the modern readership.

Reading experience

The fact that the text is interspersed with many family photos confuses the reader, says Tiger. Similar to Sebald , for example in Austerlitz , the images placed side by side would explain the text just as the text explains the images. Tiger adds that reading seemed similar to looking at a work by Escher , such as drawing , where illusions of perspective and dimension are created. Lizzie also comments on the form and its effect: “I don't think what is on Wikipedia is true: that it is Lessing's last novel. To be honest, it's not one, and it will confuse people all the more when they expect a novel here. "

Sayers finds the work moving because of its combination of fiction and factual text. For Conrad, this only applies to the second part, which she found truly moving, and she found the attempt at reconciliation with her mother even moving, because this attempt is made in the non-fictional part of the book. Sarah Norris says: When you read about Lessing's relationship with her parents, especially with his mother, one shudders because one is reminded of one's own struggles for autonomy . Birkenhauer's outrage sounds in favor of the subject presented when he writes: “For four years my mother saw soldiers die as a sister in one of the largest London hospitals. Shortly after the great battles on the continent, all London hospitals were on alert. What a perverse link to planned death. "Clodagh found something else to cry about:" There's something about English colonial life in Africa that makes me cry. Half the book was painful to read for me. "

Scheck enthusiastically reports on Lessing's change of style and pitch in the middle of the book, because with it the author is “going overboard in a wonderful way.” Others describe the effect less delighted: “And then the beautiful story ends abruptly and a randomly thrown up part begins . I don't know many readers who can switch this way or who would want to - even if they could ", whereupon this comment concretizes the experience:" I got a trench shock with this abrupt change - to use your expression (shell shock) - so that I had to find out what others were thinking and whether to keep reading. I'm glad I'm not the only one who has this feeling! "

Sergeant has observed himself reading and thinks that while reading you do your own hindsight. Readers may wonder where they have actually been and what it was exactly. When reading Alfred and Emily , Sergeant said, we have a strong feeling that time is running out, and we also wonder what can still be achieved in the remaining period. What is felt to be more serious by these two, balance out depending on how old you are. Lessing does not find a solution to all of her questions, but that is not the only point, he says, because her unanswered questions seem to readers like something living that produces echoes: From here we can move on because we get a more precise idea of ​​it got where we were and where we are, said Sergeant. Lizzie makes a similar observation when it says: “The questions of her life are not solved, but at least she poses them. Lessing asks our questions and shows whether they can be answered ”and, at the beginning and at the end of the review:“ The book hardly makes sense, I can say that much. Objectively it is bizarre to read and really fragmented and even within the individual fragments there is jumping back and forth like crazy "," This book will always be important to me, and it probably doesn't even have to make sense for it. "

Outline (original edition)

  • (Photo of a young man in cricket outfit, standing)
  • ( Portrait photo of a young woman)
  • FIRST PART. Alfred and Emily: A Novella
    • 1902
    • August 1905
    • August 1907
    • The best years
    • ( Epitaphs for Alfred and for Emily) ("Coda")
    • Explanation (a notebook )
      Interior of the Royal Free Hospital, ca.1891
    • (Two photos of the same man, the first of which is a portrait, overleaf)
    • From The London Encyclopaedia , edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, 1983 (contains the entry “ Royal Free Hospital , Pond Street, Hampstead , NW 3” and at the end a photo of a patient and a nurse in a hospital room is)
  • SECOND PART. Alfred and Emily; Two lives
    • (Photo of a man and a woman)
    • (An epigraph , quote from Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence )
    • (A chapter without a heading, beginning with "I have written about my father on various occasions; in long and short texts and in novels" ...)
    • A group of women, informal and casual (contains a photo of a person who works with oxen in the field, and later three family photos)
    • Sister McVeagh (includes photo of a farmhouse with trees)
    • insects
    • The old mawonga tree
    • care
      1930 in the center of what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare , Zimbabwe)
    • Supply - in the city
    • My brother Harry Tayler (report of a conversation with her brother Harry about the consequences of surviving the sinking of a warship as a young man in 1941. )
    • "Away-from-the-farm" (Appendix 1)
    • Problems with staff (Appendix 2)

expenditure

Print

Translations

  • Alfred and Emily , translated into German by Barbara Christ , Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-455-40135-6
  • Alfred et Emily , translated into French by Philippe Giraudon, Flammarion, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-08-121705-8
  • Alfred i Emili , translated into Serbian by Tamara Veljković Blagojević, Agora, Zrenjanin 2008, ISBN 978-86-84599-68-3
  • Alfred wa Emili , translated into Arabic by Mohammed Darwish, Arab Scientific Publishers, Beirut 2009, ISBN 978-9953-87-667-2
  • Alfred e Emily , translated into Italian by Monica Pareschi, Feltrinelli, Milano 2008, ISBN 978-88-07-01752-0
  • Alfred i Emily , translated into Catalan by Marta Pera Cucurell, Edicions 62, Barcelona 2009, ISBN 978-84-297-6192-4
  • Alfred en Emily , translated into Dutch by Mario Molegraaf, Prometheus, Amsterdam 2008, ISBN 978-90-446-1218-9
  • Alfred i Emily , translated into Polish by Anna Kołyszko, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2009, ISBN 978-83-08-04388-2
  • Alfred e Emily , translated into Portuguese by Beth Vieira e Heloisa Jahn, Companhia das Letras, São Paulo 2009, ISBN 978-85-359-1678-2
  • Alfred y Emily , translated into Spanish by Verónica Canales, Debols! Llo, Barcelona 2009, ISBN 978-84-9908-717-7
  • Alfred ile Emily: roman , translated into Turkish by Püren Özgören, Can Yayınları, İstanbul 2009, ISBN 978-975-07-1077-3
  • [My father and mother] = Alfred & Emily , Chinese translation, Nanhai chu ban, Haikou 2013, ISBN 978-7-5442-6386-3

Audiobook (selection)

  • In original language: Alfred and Emily , read by Frances Jeater, Isis Audio Books, Oxford 2009, ISBN 978-0-7531-4069-7

Research literature

  • Judith Kegan Gardiner, "Afterword: Encompassing Lessing", in: Doris Lessing. Border Crossings , edited by Alice Ridout and Sarah Watkins, Continuum, New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-8264-2466-2 , pp. 160-166
  • Virginia Tiger, "Life Story: Doris, Alfred and Emily", in: Doris Lessing Studies , vol. 28, no. 1, 2009, pp. 22-24
  • Molly Pulda, “War and Genre in Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily”, in: Doris Lessing Studies , vol. 29, no. 2, 2010, pp. 3-9
  • Susan Watkins, Doris Lessing , Manchester University Press, Manchester 2010, ISBN 978-0-7190-7481-3
  • Roberta Rubenstein, Literary Half-Lives. Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal and ‹Roman à Clef› , Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-137-41365-9
  • Elizabeth Maslen, "Epilogue", in: Doris Lessing [1994], 2nd edition, Northcote House, Tavistock 2014, ISBN 978-0-7463-1224-7 , pp. 101-103

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Virginia Tiger, "Life Story: Doris, Alfred and Emily ", in: Doris Lessing Studies , Vol. 28, No. 1, 2009, pp. 22-24.
  2. ^ A b c Susan Williams, " Alfred and Emily, by Doris Lessing, Twenty Chickens for a Saddle, by Robyn Scott ", in: The Independent , May 16, 2008
  3. ↑ a b Susan Watkins, Doris Lessing , Manchester University Press, Manchester 2010, p. 141 and p. 162
  4. ↑ Tim Adams, “ A family at war, ” in The Guardian , May 11, 2008
  5. ↑ Kathy Watson, “Alfred and Emily,” in: The tablet , vol. 262, no.8749, (July 5, 2008), p. 22
  6. ^ Caryn James, " They May Not Mean to, but They Do, " in: The New York Times , August 10, 2008
  7. ^ A b Valerie Sayers, " A Separate Peace ", in: The Washington Post , August 3, 2008
  8. ^ Frank Kermode, "The Daughter Who Hated Her. Alfred and Emily", in: The London review of books , vol. 30, no.14, (July 17, 2008), p. 25
  9. ↑ a b Franz Birkenhauer, “Tell us a story!” , Sf-magazin.de , November 28, 2008
  10. ↑ a b Bernadette Conrad, “ Lessing about their parents. The long way back home ”, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , April 21, 2009
  11. ^ Blake Morrison, " The righting of lives. On reading Alfred and Emily, Blake Morrison applauds Doris Lessing's boldness in imagining fictitious destinies for her parents ”, in: The Guardian , May 17, 2008
  12. ↑ a b Denis Scheck, Nachgtrage subsidiary love , deutschlandradiokultur.de , December 2, 2008
  13. ↑ a b c David Sergeant, " Stories to Herself ", in: The Oxonian Review of Books , summer 2008: volume 7: issue 3
  14. ^ A b Roberta Rubenstein, Literary Half-Lives. Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal and ‹Roman à Clef› , Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2014, p. 193
  15. ^ Judith Kegan Gardiner, "Encompassing Lessing", in: Doris Lessing. Border Crossings , edited by Alice Ridout and Sarah Watkins, Continuum, New York 2009, p. 163
  16. ^ WM Hagen, "Alfred and Emily", in: World Literature Today , World Literature in Review, Miscellaneous, vol. 83, no.4 (July / August 2009), p. 78
  17. ↑ Elizabeth Maslen, "Epilogue", in: Doris Lessing [1994], 2nd edition, Northcote House, Tavistock 2014, pp. 101-103, p. 101
  18. ↑ Tim Parks, “The Knife by the Handle at Last”. Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing, Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found by Marie Brenner, House Rules by Rachel Sontag, Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in my Father's House by Miranda Seymour, The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende, ”in: The New York Review of Books , vol. 55, no. 14, (September 25, 2008), pp. 18–22, p. 18, p. 20
  19. ↑ MC Escher, Figure Drawing (1948)
  20. ^ A b Lizzie, Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing, "I've put off reviewing this one a bit, because I'm not entirely sure what to say. This book was really, really important to me - but this book is wacko ... " , goodreads.com , August 6, 2014
  21. ^ Sarah Norris, Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing , Barnes & Noble review , September 25, 2008
  22. ↑ Clodagh, Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing, “more doris. yay ... “ , goodreads.com , January 8, 2011
  23. ↑ Lara, Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing, “What a strange read! ... “ , goodreads.com , September 22, 2008
  24. ↑ Haley, Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing, "I am so ... to use her word ... 'shell-shocked' at the abrupt change ..." , goodreads.com , September 22, 2008
  25. ↑ Molly Pulda, "War and Genre in Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily ", in: Doris Lessing Studies , Vol 29, No.. 2, 2010, pp. 3-9.