The gambling

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The game of chance is a novel by Gabriele Wohmann that was published by Luchterhand in Darmstadt in 1981 .

Manfred Jurgensen - see below under secondary literature - assigns the book to women's literature .

Gabriele Wohmann (1992)

action

The summer of 1980, when the young piano teacher Elisabeth Siemer, known as Lilly, lost her temper, was very hot.

Lilly's husband Theo ran away with a certain Ingrid Klein after he had articulated his intention to divorce. Theo's son Arthur, whom he brought into the marriage years ago when he was twelve, now works as a telecommunications technician and continues to live in the household of the otherwise childless stepmother. That is not enough. Claudia Grübler, who has three children and a husband, also shamelessly exploits her friend Lilly. Her uncle Oswald, a pensioner who is concerned about his physical well-being in every situation, she has permanently accommodated in Lilly's household. Sometimes Uncle Oswald simply determines the sequence of the evening TV programs. Otherwise, the two male parasites stick their legs under Lilly's kitchen table and let the housewife serve them. Lilly receives no thanks for her daily dedication; Not from the taciturn Arthur anyway and Uncle Oswald even complains about dinner. Lilly, not yet thirty, needs a man. When, in the summer heat mentioned above, she approaches the sturdy Arthur, who shot up during puberty, she heard a hurtful "get away". This is too much. Lilly beats the stepson, who has been loved for years and suddenly hated, in her kitchen in front of the open refrigerator with a canned grapefruit. Arthur survived with a "blunt concussion " but was damaged. From now on, “the old tensioner” Uncle Oswald, who observed the course of events, examined Lilly's menu with suspicion and suspicion. This new behavior culminates in this: Uncle Oswald has the contents of a soup tureen, prepared by Lilly, examined for traces of evidence at the Third Police Station. The wrong friend Claudia Grübler makes Lilly with a Dr. Klaus Feldmann known. The medic keeps Lilly asleep for weeks. In bed, Dr. Feldmann does not find out why Lilly struck the kitchen with the canned food. So he leaves the woman and is never to be seen again. Lilly has no luck with the men; has - to use the title of the novel - lost her game of chance three times. It looks like Dr. Feldmann expressed his doubts to Theo or Claudia that Lilly was completely at ease.

Half a year goes by. While shoveling the snow, Lilly wonders: Why did I allow myself to be kept away from Arthur's funeral? After John Lennon's death, Arthur had tried to follow his idol to death and tried in vain to persuade Lilly to commit a double suicide. The stepmother thought Arthur was schizophrenic .

Claudia, Theo and Uncle Oswald reach their destination. Lilly is taken to the third police station.

Criminal

The narrator doesn't actually move far from Lilly. Occasionally, however, prehistory is brought in, not chronologically, but in time leaps back and forth. On the one hand, Gabriele Wohmann explains in a credible way what the person really looks like inside. On the other hand, the end of the novel is surprising. It turns out that Gabriele Wohmann has presented something like a criminal case. At least Lilly's relatives consider the piano teacher to be a criminal. The closer inspection of the text shows that Gabriele Wohmann's lecture conceals everything that belongs to the "case" and says almost nothing to the reader amid a jumble of incidental matters. It starts with seemingly trifles like Gabriele Wohmann's punctuation. As in all of her novels, dialogues are basically "punctuated" without quotation marks. This has a fatal consequence. The lulled reader finally loses sight of the "criminal case". Lilly is taken away by the police at the end of the novel. This forces the reader, who was seduced by Gabriele Wohmann through an irrelevant torrent of words, to turn back when asked why. In the process, more difficult or unanswerable whys arise: Why does Theo only join the plot at the end of the novel in the winter following midsummer and deny Lilly any sensible behavior? How did Arthur die? What role does Dr. Klaus Feldmann investigating Lilly's midsummer attack on Arthur in the kitchen, exactly? To cut a long story short: Gabriele Wohmann describes flat everyday family life down to the last detail over dozens of pages and the essentials, i.e. the causes of the protagonist's final arrest, are at best only marginally hinted at by third parties. For example, flat refers to the details of Claudia Grübler's children and the cats, dogs and poultry that haunted the novel.

reception

literature

First edition

Used edition

Secondary literature

  • Mona Knapp and Gerhard Knapp: Moments of Oppression of Women. Gabriele Wohmann's novel 'Das Glücksspiel'. P. 139–160 in: Manfred Jurgensen (Ed.): Frauenliteratur. Authors - Perspectives - Concepts. Lang, Frankfurt am Main and Bern 1983, 233 pages, ISBN 978-3-261-05013-7

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, p. 76, 9. Zvo and p. 78, 1. Zvo
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 142, 11. Zvo
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 142, 15. Zvu and p. 138, 1. Zvu
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 56, 7th Zvu
  5. ↑ Table of contents to Jurgensen's book Frauenliteratur

Remarks

  1. ↑ The year is not mentioned in the novel, but an event that points to it: John Lennon died on December 8, 1980.
  2. ↑ Lilly is no longer loved by Theo, Arthur and the curious Doctor Feldmann.
  3. ↑ This bird, the aged "dull blue budgie " Karl, the pet is also elderly, more - 82-year-old woman Würmann (used edition, page 16, 7 ZVO).