The girl (novel)
The girl (English original title: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon ) is a novel by the American writer Stephen King . The novel was published by Viking Publishing in New York in 1999 . The German translation by Wulf Bergner was published by Schneekluth-Verlag in 2000.
action
Nine year old Patricia McFarland, known as "Trisha", suffers from the separation of her parents and the endless arguments between her brother Pete and her mother. On a hike into the wilderness of New England , she moves away from the two of them to pee unobserved between bushes and trees. She wants to shorten the way back and gets lost. With increasing alarm and despair, she looks for the way back, but gets deeper and deeper into the forest. In her backpack she has two Twinkies , a hard-boiled egg, a tuna sandwich, a bottle of lemonade, a bottle of water, a bag of potato chips, a rain poncho , a Gameboy and her battery-operated Walkman with radio reception.
As she wanders through the forest, she remembers helpful things that her mother said to her or that she read in books, such as that rivers never flow in circles, but always lead to people. On the way to a stream she slips into a tree with a wasp nest and is stung by dozens of wasps . The path taken along the stream ends in a swamp. Your food supplies are running out. She has now moved a long way and is out of the area that the search parties are searching.
Again and again she has to defend herself against her own inner voice, not to make the way back out of the wilderness. She feels that she is being watched and followed by a “special thing” that introduces itself in a dream as the “God of the lost”. She feels it around her, especially at night.
In the meantime, a lot is happening in the outside world as well: Her argumentative brother withdraws into himself, mother and father sleep in the same bed again. The police are meanwhile led on the wrong track, arrest a suspect and then reduce the search area.
Trisha drinks stream water and eats pseudo-berries , beechnuts , raw fish and tadpoles . First she vomits what she has eaten and has diarrhea. She's slowly getting sick, but dragging herself on with a fever. She draws hope from inner dialogues with her idol Tom Gordon . He is a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox baseball team . She listens to his team's games every evening on her radio walkman while its battery is still running. Later, when reality and imagination mix due to a loss of strength, Tom Gordon appears again and again as her strengthening companion. He motivates the filthy, weak, sick and frightened Trisha to keep trying hard until she finally finds a road.
The goal is within reach, her pursuer comes out of the undergrowth and steps out onto the street opposite her. A decisive battle ensues.
In the episode of the novel, father, mother and brother gather around Trisha's hospital bed. She spent nine days in the wild. She concludes her victory with Tom Gordon's victory gesture: with the outstretched index finger in the sky. Then she falls into a deep sleep.
useful information
Tom Gordon is a real life Boston Red Sox player.
For marketing reasons, the book was published by the German Schneekluth Verlag in two versions with the same content, which only differ in the design of the dust jacket (black or white).
An intended film adaptation by director George A. Romero did not materialize.
literature
- Stephen King: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon . Hodder & Stoughton, London 2000, ISBN 0-340-76559-3 .
- Stephen King: The girl. Roman ("The girl who loved Tom Gordon"). Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-548-26841-5 .
- Audio book
- Stephen King: The girl. Audio book . Lübe-Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 2007, ISBN 978-3-404-77169-1 (7 CDs, read by Franziska Pigulla and Joachim Kerzel ).