On the beach (Pavese)

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On the beach is the title of a novel by the Italian writer Cesare Pavese . It is about a summer vacation of the narrator with his friend Doro and his wife Clelia on the Riviera near Genoa. The original “La spiaggia” was published chapter by chapter in magazines in 1941 and in book form in 1942; the German translation by Arianna Giachi appeared in 1970 together with two other novels under the book title Der Comrade .

overview

Like most of the author's novels, the summer story, which is divided into ten sections, does not have a stringent structure, but rather, like a station sequence, consists of loosely lined up holiday situations, e.g. B. Conversations on the beach, in the restaurant, at evening parties or excursions, and observations of the first-person narrator together. The focus of the plot is the young married couple Doro and Clelia. The narrator senses that a change is taking place in the relationship between his friend and his wife and would like to find out the reason, but both of them repeatedly elude his questions, and he only learns the connection at the pointed end.

content

In the introduction the narrator, a teacher and writer from Turin , gives a brief review of the history of his friendship with Doro. They were closely related in their youth and spent a lot of time together. This phase came to an end when Doro married the lovely Clelia, sold his villa and moved to Genoa , where the in-laws ran a business. Doro now concentrated his life on himself and his wife. They had a happy marriage and traveled extensively. The narrator reacted to the boyfriend's breakup with him with a mixture of disappointment and envy and did not attend the wedding. After a period of estrangement, there was a rapprochement. He visited the couple in Genoa, got on well with Clelia and was invited several times to vacation together in their small villa on the Riviera. Two years pass before he finally accepts the offer.

The main plot begins with Doro's surprising visit to him in Turin and his request to accompany him on a short trip to the homeland of his childhood before their summer vacation by the sea. He contradicts the narrator's assumption that he is going back to his origins and asserts that he just wants to "drink a little local wine [...] and once again sing merrily with old friends." [He] is just looking for a change. "So the now over thirty-year-olds return to their" boyhood "when they wandered through the hill country near Turin and stayed in the old villa of Doro's family:" dark, wooded mountains, whose long morning shadows on them yellow hills with their farms fell ”. You roam the area around Doro's birthplace and meet some peers in the hotel in the evening. a. the bricklayer Ginio, play billiards, get drunk and come up with the idea of ​​serenading the sisters Rosina and Marina Murette in the moonlight. They beat out their songs loudly in front of the house and disturb the nightly quiet of the neighbors. There was scuffle and they were pelted with objects from the windows and driven away by a shot. The next morning they leave to avoid getting beaten up and travel to the sea.

In the following main storyline, the narrator uses this sway to amuse the enchanting Clelia on a walk by the sea. He notices that "[i] her eyes [...] in her tanned face [looked] more decisive and harder than before" and wants to uncover the secret of the suspected relationship disorder, but both avoid his questions and deny the sensitive one Narrator perceived tension. Although they treat each other with respect and do not argue, they both seem to be preoccupied with something unspoken, and the narrator wonders why Doro made the trip home with him and not with Clelia, and why they have no child yet.

He looks for a room so as not to intrude into the privacy of his friends and to keep his own space. From the window he looks at an olive tree, which gives him the feeling of "being in the country, in an unknown landscape." However, he spends most of the time with Clelia or Doro on the beach, swimming and sunbathing, at dinner Trios in the villa before the Genoese clique appears to play cards, or while driving in Guido's car, for example. B. to a café or dance hall high above the sea, during conversations, on excursions etc. This creates the image of a wealthy holiday company for the narrator with their superficial chats and gossip about relationships: possible marriage plans of the lively, talkative Ginetta and Umbertos and the Unsuitable Amouren Guidos with the cashier Nina and the not yet eighteen year old Berti with a prostitute who has chosen him to be her vacation friend. Everything seems like a no-obligation gimmick to fill the day. The women judge the men as egoists who do not want to commit themselves, and the men do not want to give up their freedom or accept any obligations.

Clelia is the focal point of the novel, she loves social life, likes to dance and enjoys being swarmed around, is capricious, non-committal and likes to chat away funny. In addition to her husband, she has three different admirers:

  • the forty-year-old bon vivant and idler Guido, a colleague of her husband. He leads a double vacation life: one in the middle-class Genoese clique, whom he drives around in his car, and second with his lover Nina, with whom he lives in the hotel and whom he does not take with him to high society.
  • Seventeen-year-old Berti, a former student of the narrator who dropped out of school, is currently without prospects and is looking for a connection with his teacher who happened to be there. He is in a phase of orientation and wants to talk to the narrator about literature and life. He follows him on the beach and so comes into Clelia's circle of friends. He is seduced into a sexual adventure by an older woman, but is ashamed to be seen with her. He is fascinated by Clelia. He evidently imagines that she, who asked him to dance, lives very liberally and freely, and has unrealistic hopes of closer contact. When he finds out that she is married, he is disappointed and confused about her supposed easy-going lifestyle. Although she always keeps her distance, it is difficult for him to let go of his hopes. At the end of the novel, the narrator takes him back to Turin, where his parents live.
  • The narrator is also one of Clelia's admirers. He likes to chat with her and entertain her with stories and anecdotes from his youth, with news from the holiday colony he learned from Guido or Ginetta, or with Berti's advances. But his fascination is more of a spiritual nature. He feels a certain kinship when she talks about her childhood, her home by the sea and her search for solitude while swimming. When she walks out of the water to the beach alone, he sees her as a mythological figure. She explains her ambivalence to him: “[M] an must never remember what I said. I talk and talk because I have a tongue in my mouth and because I can't be alone. You shouldn't take me seriously either, it's not worth it. [...] if she wasn't who she was - a spoiled little girl who hadn't learned anything - then she would paint the sea that she loves so much and that belongs entirely to her. "She always goes swimming alone and refuses the narrator's offer to accompany her: “The sea is company enough for me. I don't want anyone with me. In life I have nothing that is mine alone. At least leave me the sea. ”Guido interprets Clelia's need to listen to the lapping of the water between the rocks as an erotic togetherness: it is“ Clelia's secret passion, for the sake of which she deceives us all. […] 'Who knows what a woman like you can tell about the waves. I can only imagine too well what you said to each other when you hug. ""
In conversations with acquaintances and in his personal relationships, the narrator also portrays himself: his homeland reference to the land of the hills with their olive trees, his loneliness in the midst of the socializing in which he participates, and his assessment of the superficial chatters and idlers. Clelia noticed this spiritual orientation. When saying goodbye, after revealing her and Doro's situation, she smiles at him, "as if she wanted to apologize, and raised her handkerchief to her mouth:" Aren't you disgusted with me? "She asked."
  • Doro is related to the narrator in his social behavior and his interest in art. He, too, seeks solitude in nature and is often silent and thoughtful in the group. Again and again he paints the sea, is dissatisfied with the results and finally gives up.

In the end, the news of Clelia's pregnancy dissipates the tension. You and Doro have to break off the seaside vacation and return to Genoa. When saying goodbye to the narrator, she regrets the end of her stay by the sea and reacts ironically to a suggestion from her husband for a medical examination with “it starts with fatherhood. Now only he has to give orders. ”Both have come to terms with the fact that a phase of life is coming to an end for them. The narrator also leaves and takes the unhappily in love Berti with him to Turin. He assures Clelia that he is "happy to have spent her last girls summer with her."

reception

In contrast to the author's late work, which was highly valued by the critics, the novel “Am Strand” is mostly viewed as a small study and interpreted in connection with an “L'homme et l'oeuvre” analysis of Pavese's complete works; H. with a tendency to focus the autobiographical aspect of childhood memories with a myth of home.

In the neglect of the “beach” in research, the aspect that the contemporary critics received the book with little indifference and that Pavese distanced himself from his novel and did not allow a new edition obviously also plays a role. In his investigation, Hösle explains the author's statement from 1946 that the novel is the result of absent-mindedness, also in human terms, and that he would like to be ashamed of it, in connection with the changed political attitude of Pavese in the "Year of the Comrade" , after joining the communist party. Apparently the bourgeois narrative, in which the affluent social class is not questioned in its raison d'etre, no longer fit into his new worldview. In the later novels Pavese accentuated his criticism of the rich idleness and the insubstantiality of the chats, as well as of the bourgeois man-woman role model. If in the “beach” it is just a holiday phase of relaxation, the “dolce farniente” in the “devil on the hills” or in the “lonely women” becomes a way of life for the bourgeoisie. Under the aspect of emancipation, the Clelia of the “beach” contrasts with the eponymous protagonist of the “lonely women”.

Hösle protects the novel from its author. It was composed as a station sequence similar to the later novels (e.g. The Devil on the Mountain, The Lonely Women ) and already contained their themes, motifs and even individual personal conflicts: the sentimental love of a young man for a dazzling socialite, the The question of life orientation and identity, the departure of a woman from an unbound phase of life and the end of a carefree existence without obligations and responsibility, the memory of youth and the longing for home, the escape from idle communication into loneliness, the myth the hills and the sea, the return to the places of childhood that help to quench the “thirst for myth”. In this context, Hösle quotes an entry in Pavese's diary from September 17, 1943: “The meadow, the forest, the beach of childhood are not real objects among many, but the meadow, the beach as they were revealed to us in the absolute and our transcendental Giving shape to imagination ”. Similar to Hösle, Lienhard Bergel sees the importance of the “spiaggia” especially in the fact that the author has succeeded in bringing the basic problem of his existence and his characters - overcoming youth and integrating into adult life - to a positive end, but Hösle relativizes that this return to bourgeois life is accompanied by melancholy and sarcastic remarks by the protagonists.

German editions

  • Cesare Pavese: The comrade. Among peasants. At the beach. Three novels. From Italy. by Arianna Giachi. Claassen, Hamburg a. Düsseldorf 1970, ISBN 3546473914
  • Cesare Pavese: Summer thunderstorm. Among peasants. At the beach. The leather jacket. Stories. People and World, Berlin 1976
  • Cesare Pavese: On the beach. Novel. From Italy. by Arianna Giachi. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 978-3-596-25303-6

literature

  • Lienhard Bergel: "Spiaggia" in: Lo Spettatore italiano October 10, 1955.
  • Johannes Hösle: "Cesare Pavese". In: "Contemporary Italian literature: from Cesare Pavese to Dario Fo". Beck Munich 1999, p. 23 ff.
  • Johannes Hösle: "Farewell to the youth (La bella estate and Spiaggia)". In: "Cesare Pavese". Gruyter Berlin 1964, p. 63 ff. Full text / preview in the Google book search

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Cesare Pavese: "On the beach". Fischer Frankfurt am Main, 1983, p. 25.
  2. ↑ Hösle suspects Aphrodite as a model: Johannes Hösle: "Farewell to the youth (La bella estate and La Spiaggia)". In: "Cesare Pavese". Gruyter Berlin 1964, p. 63 ff. Full text / preview in the Google book search
  3. ↑ Cesare Pavese: "On the Beach". Fischer Frankfurt am Main, 1983, p. 61.
  4. ↑ Cesare Pavese: "On the Beach". Fischer Frankfurt am Main, 1983, p. 55.
  5. ↑ Cesare Pavese: "On the Beach". Fischer Frankfurt am Main, 1983, p. 38.
  6. ↑ Cesare Pavese: "On the Beach". Fischer Frankfurt am Main, 1983, p. 90.
  7. ↑ Cesare Pavese: "On the Beach". Fischer Frankfurt am Main, 1983, p. 91.
  8. ↑ The beautiful summer. Three novels. Reception.
  9. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Ertler and Werner Helmich (eds.): "The review work by Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, a complete edition". Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 2005, p. 157.
  10. ↑ Johannes Hösle: "Farewell to the young (La bella estate and La Spiaggia)". In: "Cesare Pavese". Gruyter Berlin 1964, p. 63 ff. Full text / preview in the Google book search
  11. ^ Johannes Hösle: Cesare Pavese. In: "Contemporary Italian literature: from Cesare Pavese to Dario Fo". Beck Munich 1999, p. 23 ff.
  12. ^ Lienhard Bergel: "Spiaggia" in: Lo Spettatore italiano October 10, 1955, p. 420 f.