Aurélien (novel)
Aurélien is a 1944 Gallimard novel by Louis Aragon . The novel describes the unhappy love between World War II veteran Aurélien Leurtillois and the married Bérénice Morel.
action
Aurélien Leurtillois last took part in the First World War in 1917/18 as a lieutenant in the Orient Army in Saloniki, where he was infected with mala fever, which returns in attacks. He lived in Paris in the first post-war years on income from leasing his property and devoted himself to idleness. He falls in love with Bérénice, who is visiting the city, although at first he finds her "simply ugly". Although she is inclined to do so, Aurélien rejects it because she is “obsessed with sinking”. She lived for a short time with the unsuccessful young Parisian poet Paul Denis. Aurélien no longer finds a proper place in Parisian society, moves to Lille and starts a family.
Aurélien later learns of the looming affair between Bérénice and Paul Denis. Aurélien bears the burden of the fact that Bérénice has turned away from him and devoted himself to the in his eyes poorer game Denis. When Bérénice separates from Denis, he throws himself into a fight and dies, not unintentionally, of the consequences. But Bérénice returns to her one-armed husband in the provinces .
Eighteen years later, in the late phase of the German invasion of World War II , Aurélien arrives as a captain on the retreat of a tank unit in the hometown of Bérénice and meets her alive from her husband. It becomes clear to him that she believed him to be the love of her life and that from then on she had broken away from the world of men. Aurélien explains the same feelings to her, although she is now happily married. As a result of an excursion, Aurélien notices the differences between the two that have grown in the last few years of separation when they have a difference of opinion. On the way home, both get into a wild shootout with advancing German troops. Bérénice dies in Aurélien's arms.
background
The novel represents the fourth (and final) part of a cycle entitled The Real World , which Louis Aragon began in 1934 with The Bells of Basel and planned to consist of thirty novels. However, it is only loosely connected with the three previous novels, most likely with The Quarter of the Rich (1936). The Paris of the first post-war years describes Aragon with an extraordinary density based on many sensual and atmospheric details. Some critics see in Aurélien an encoded character study of the writer, dandy and later collaborator Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and in the figure of Bérénice the cousin of André Breton's wife , Denise Lévy. Aragon himself sees his novel in an afterword to the French new edition in 1966 as an expression of the “impossibility of the couple”, which fails because of the lack of simultaneity of feelings. Bérénice is also the name of the main character in Jean Racine 's tragedy of the same name from 1670, which Aragon quotes at the beginning of the novel.
Aragon uses a plaster cast of the unknown from the Seine to let Aurélien describe the subliminal beauty of Bérénice.
German editions
- Aurélien. Volk und Welt publishing house , East Berlin 1952.
- Aurélien. Kindler Verlag, Munich 1961 (licensed edition of the 1952 edition).
- Aurélien. The new translation is Lydia Babilas, Düsseldorf 1987, Bertelsmann Century Edition 1998.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Louis Aragon: The Parisian Peasant . German Edition Frankfurt 1996, note by the translator Lydia Babilas , p. 225.
- ↑ Hanns Grössl: Obsessed by the absolute. In: Die Zeit 32/1987, July 31, 1987.