The book of Daniel

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The Book of Daniel (Engl. The Book of Daniel , 1971, dt .: 1974) is a novel by EL Doctorow , who was inspired by the Rosenberg case. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were accused in the early 1950s of giving secrets to the Soviets to build an atomic bomb. At Doctorow, the two bear the names Paul and Rochelle Isaacson. The story is told in the late 1960s by Daniel, the older son of the two, who cares for his younger sister Susan.

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After his sister Susan attempted suicide, Daniel reconstructs the story of his parents and childhood. There are frequent changes in the narrative perspective and flashbacks are often used. The atmosphere of the 50s / McCarthy era as well as the 60s with their protest culture is conveyed. After the parents were imprisoned, the children grew up with the Lewin couple. Susan is the one of the two who is heavily involved in politics and threatens to despair of the state of the world. Daniel, on the other hand, refuses to deal with his parents and the political circumstances for a long time. As a framework, you experience Daniel in a library, where the novel ends with a few lines from the biblical book Daniel .

The book consists of four parts.

1. Memorial Day - Daniel, married to Phyllis, is confronted with his sister attempting suicide. The section ends with the dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan.
2. Halloween - The Isaacsons trial, the role of attorney Ascher.
3. Starfish - Daniel, previously emphatically apolitical, takes part in a protest march while his sister suffers from the aftermath of her suicide attempt.
4. Christmas - The role of co-defendant Mindish, whom Daniel visits in the 60s, is highlighted. Funerals (of parents, sister) are described.

Edits

The novel was filmed in 1983 by Sidney Lumet under the title Daniel .

Real influences on the novel

  • In the novel, the family attended a concert by Paul Robeson in 1949 . Then there are arguments that actually took place. These are the so-called Peekskill Riots.
  • Two of the grandmother's sisters were killed in the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire on March 25, 1911.

Differences to the real Rosenberg case

  • The Rosenbergs had no daughter, but two sons.
  • Mindish appears to have been composed of two real characters: Morton Sobell and David Greenglass .

Reviews

The writer Daniel Kehlmann , who claims that he understood through Doctorow's novel Billy Bathgate what the voice of a novel is, wrote in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about EL Doctorow and the different linguistic styles of his novels:

“You can find the characters in a book uninteresting and yet love the voice, just as you can be gripped by the story and characters without taking a liking to the voice, and when that happens, the author has failed. Anyone who wants to explore this most mysterious aspect of the art of the novel cannot find a better object of study than EL Doctorow's books, each of which seems to be written by a new writer, regardless of the context of the themes and motifs. The Billy Bathgate tone, in the pendulum beating of his long, long sentences, is very different from the tone of the unreliable, because personally deeply involved, narrator Daniel Isaacson in "The Book of Daniel", the sheriff of "Welcome to Hard Times" who struggles with his fear ”Or the weird omniscient historian of“ Ragtime ”. Good literature arises from the economy of resources, but great literature from waste. It gives the impression that everything is easy and there are no limits to the imagination. "

criticism

expenditure

  • EL Doctorow: The Book of Daniel. Random House, New York 1971.
  • EL Doctorow: The Book of Daniel. Insel, Frankfurt / Main 1974. German by Thomas Schlück .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Daniel Kehlmann: He learned from Kleist and I from him in the FAZ, April 7, 2011, accessed on July 23, 2014