Breathing exercises

Breathing exercises (Engl. Breathing Lessons ) is a novel of the American writer Anne Tyler , who in 1988 appeared in the original and 1989 in German translation. In the same year the author received the Pulitzer Prize for this novel .

Robert McCrum named the work in his list of the 100 best English-language novels compiled for the Guardian .

content

The couple Maggie and Ira Moran describe breathing exercises . Both are around fifty and married to each other for around thirty. Ira works in a small picture frame business taken over from her father . Maggie, described as "a bowl", is a housewife.

The life of this couple is narrative condensed into a single day of driving a car into a funeral. From this trip, the description falls back and forth digressing and backwards into the consideration of the entire life, describes decisive situations that illuminate how this couple became what it is. Tyler's view of her two main characters is close and understanding; the normality thus obtained seems to alternate between the magic of consensuality and neuroticism, which is precisely why it is authentic.

For example, there is a story about an elderly gentleman who slows the traveling couple on the country road and then almost childishly plays a prank on Maggie by indicating that one of the wheels of his car is loose while overtaking. But then they turn around, guided by Maggie's feelings of guilt, to see whether the old man has remained unharmed:

“ Ira wondered why Maggie had to keep inviting other people into both of their lives. She didn't have enough of just one husband, he suspected. For them two was not a satisfactory number ... "  (159)

The fact that the husband expresses this lack of understanding (at least to himself) seems to be aimed at closeness again. Two people in particular who are so different develop the possibility of acceptance from the verbalization of their detachment. The irreconcilable seems to have been reconciled and a certain sense has been added to the neurotic, so that a friend at the wedding " ... to sit on a sofa with a decent, perfectly normal husband and be away for a thousand years. see "  (119) wants to see the highest happiness.

At least, in breathing exercises, the author is able to offer a glimpse of normality that has so far hardly been found in the literature and that is otherwise rarely gained. It can convey that happiness and everyday life are not in irreconcilable opposition to one another.

Book editions

• Anne Tyler: Breathing lessons , 1988, German: Atemübungen , Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-10-080009-5 / Fischer-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-596-10924-8 .