Burr (novel)
Burr is a 1973 historical novel by Gore Vidal . It is the first volume of the seven-part novel series Narratives of Empire and contains the fictional memoirs of Aaron Burr .
content
The protagonist of the novel, which is set between 1833 and 1840, is Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, who works as a trainee lawyer in the law firm of Burr in New York City . Delaying the admission test as a lawyer, Schuyler works as a reporter for a newspaper. He records the memoirs dictated by Burr, in which George Washington , Thomas Jefferson , Alexander Hamilton and James Madison are portrayed, among others . Spurred on by the editor of the newspaper he works for, Schuyler tries to find out in conversations with Burr whether the rumor is true that Martin van Buren is his illegitimate son. He is thrown into a moral conflict because on the one hand he hopes for financial gain through the publication of the memoirs and the confirmation of the rumor, on the other hand he feels great admiration for Burr. At the end of the novel, Schuyler learns that not only van Buren, but also himself, is an illegitimate son of Burr. Van Buren, who has meanwhile been elected President , gives him a diplomatic post in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies .
reception
Burr was heavily criticized in the New York Times Book Review by George Dangerfield . He accused him of mixing up the roles of a novelist and a historian , which in the end leads to boring as a narrator and deceiving as a historian. Only the last, purely fictional chapter, could convince but not save the novel as a whole. The book received more favorable reviews in New York magazine . Eliot Fremont-Smith criticizes the character of old Burr as uninteresting and powerless, since she killed Hamilton in the duel . Nevertheless, the novel makes the ideas, assumptions and obsessions typical of that time understandable and convincingly depicts the closely linked personal and political relationships of the generation of the founding fathers of the United States up to Andrew Jackson .
expenditure
The first edition of the novel was published in 1973 by Random House and chronologically forms the first part of the seven-volume novel series Narratives of Empire , although it was published after the novel Washington DC (1967). The first German translation by Günter Panske was published in 1975 by C. Bertelsmann Verlag .
- Burr . C. Bertelsmann Verlag, Gütersloh 1975, ISBN 978-3-5700-2308-2
literature
- 7. Burr (1973) . In Susan Baker, Curtis S. Gibson: Gore Vidal: A Critical Companion . Greenwood Press, Westport (CT) 1997, ISBN 0-313-29579-4
- Joanne B. Freeman: History As Told by the Devil Incarnate . In Mark C. Carnes (Ed.): Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other) . Simon and Schuster, New York City 2001, ISBN 0-684-85765-0 , pp. 29-44
Individual evidence
- ↑ George Dangerfield : Less than history and less than fiction . New York Times Book Review, Oct. 28, 1973, p. 2
- ↑ Eliot Fremont-Smith: Burr and Gore . New York, Oct. 29, 1973, p. 87