Brazzaville Beach (novel)
Brazzaville Beach is William Boyd's fifth novel, published in 1990, and won several literary awards . The German translation of the same name by Gertraude Krueger was published in 1993.
Brazzaville Beach is a science novel and tells the story of the English behavioral scientist Hope Clearwater - in changing chapters on the one hand that of her work stay in the Congo and on the other hand that of her marriage to a mathematician. A third narrative level is made up of diary notes that were written afterwards and inserted between the individual chapters.
content
Hope Clearwater's working stay in Africa forms the central narrative strand in first-person form. After a failed marriage with a mathematician and his suicide, Clearwater joined a research group led by the world-famous chimpanzee researcher Eugene Malabar in the Grosso Arvore National Park in the civil war-torn Congo, where they researched the social behavior of groups of chimpanzees living in the wild. Every now and then she goes to the capital and meets with her Egyptian lover Usman Shoukry, a fighter jet pilot in the national armed forces. During one of these trips she gets caught between the front lines and is led by a small group of rebels around Dr. Amilcar and his Atomique boume volleyball team - a number of harmless child soldiers - taken hostage and dragged through the bush for nine days, together with a colleague who was able to escape, until the group was broken up and only Amilcar was left who blows himself up in a daring terrorist act.
In the course of their work finds Hope, is that their observations of chimpanzee groups materially from the romantic image of the peacefulness of our evolutionary history ancestors as Malabar common it is different: the primates hordes fight each other; there is rivalry and violence up to murder and Cannibalism . However, Malabar is undisputed within the team, and Hope's research results are deliberately suppressed, her tent is set on fire and her documents are burned. Eventually there is a confrontation, Malabar becomes violent and Hope is forced to leave the camp. She later learns that Malabar has made a scientific U-turn and is now presenting her research as his. Disaffected, she lives on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean in a house that Usman left her after his crash, and writes a diary.
The content of the second, authorially narrated strand is the story of the marriage of Hope Clearwater, née Dunbar, to the mathematician John Clearwater, which is characterized by the slow mental decline of John. After an ambitious career start in the field of chaos theory , applied to turbulence research and game theory , his work stagnates, he has strange seizures, his condition alternates between hectic and apathy, he has an affair with the wife of a colleague, so that Hope gets the desired divorce finally gratefully accepts. Hope had completed her doctorate on domination and territory during the marriage, published several scientific papers, and finally accepted a job as an ecologist on a project in landscape history in Dorset , where she had little more to do than identify ancient hedges, but still wasn't unhappy with the work. After the divorce, John and Hope occasionally meet. When he stays away for a strange long time during a visit to Dorset, she finds him drowned in the nearby pond - suicide. Hope breaks off her job in Dorset and goes to Africa.
Themes and motifs
Central themes of the novel are science, exemplified by the hierarchy and the tendrils in the research camp , as well as primate research as social research : The chimpanzee groups - seen as evolutionarily closest relatives of humans - behave "humanly", show the whole register of emotions from love to Aggression and cannibalism.
Another topic is the scientist's slow slide into madness through preoccupation with the opaque complexity of his research, here chaos theory and turbulence research.
The war is the setting for the story and here again mainly the absurd sides of armed conflicts, as in several previous novels Boyds.
Awards
- 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
- 1990 McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year
expenditure
- Original English Edition: Brazzaville Beach at Sinclair-Stevenson London 1990
- First edition in German: Brazzaville Beach , German by Gertraude Krueger, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt 1993. ISBN 3-498-00552-9
- Paperback: Brazzaville Beach , same translation; Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch-Verlag 2007. ISBN 3-833-30490-1
literature
- Alexandra Tischel: Monkeys like us. What the literature says about our closest relatives. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2018, ISBN 978-3-476-04598-0 , pp. 76-93.