The orange girl

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The Orange Girl (Original: Appelsinpiken ) is a philosophical novel by the Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder from 2003 .

content

When the now 15-year-old Georg was still in kindergarten, his father died of cancer. His last wish was not to give away or even sell the children's cart in which Georg had once played. Georg is now 15 years old and his grandmother finds a letter from his father in this cart. Georg is confused, amazed and enthusiastic at the same time; he retires to his room to study the pile of papers more closely. The more he delves into the letter, the further he moves away from his life situation: his grandparents, his mother and their new husband are sitting in the living room and waiting. In the meantime, Georg takes breaks from reading to reflect on what his father once wrote to him.

The common thread within the letter is the mysterious orange girl, whose acquaintance Georg's father made. First he meets her on the tram, loaded with a bag full of juicy and beautiful oranges - a fateful encounter, since she has dominated his mind ever since. Georg's father falls head over heels in love with her, so he goes looking for her after they parted ways. The longing brings both together again. With a strange and comical sentence that the orange girl utters to Georg's father, Georg himself is also made to think. In the end, the truth is revealed to him that the mysterious orange girl is his mother. He learns a lot about his father's past and draws conclusions from it for his own future.

review

The Orange Girl is Jostein Gaarder's most personal novel: the author writes a touching story about a father's love and sense of responsibility towards his son - even after his death, the father left his son a valuable inheritance in the form of a story from which he can learn in many ways can.

Like many of Gaarder's novels, The Orange Girl is characterized by the artfully merged storylines on different temporal levels. In his review for Der Spiegel , Klemens Kindermann describes this art: “The strength of the Norwegian [...] is to seduce the reader to reflect and think further, and he succeeds in doing this excellently. "The Orange Girl" is a love story, and in this literary humus Gaarder's piercing kind of self-questioning, which is a mixture of wonder, dream and self-doubt, thrives. "

expenditure

The book was published as a hardback edition in October 2003 ( ISBN 3-446-20344-3 ). The German translation is by Gabriele Haefs . It was published in 2005 as a paperback ( ISBN 3-423-13396-1 ) by Deutsches Taschenbuch Verlag , and in 2003 a radio play version was also published beforehand. At the end of 2004, the musical version of the book of the same name premiered at the Theater der Stadt Trier. The stage work was penned by Christian Gundlach (book), Martin Lingnau (music) and Edith Jeske (lyrics). The rights for the piece are held by the theater publisher Whale Songs . On December 5, 2008, the Austrian premiere of the musical took place in Vienna's Das Off Theater. In December 2009 the paperback was reissued with a new cover on the occasion of the film's release ( ISBN 978-3-423-08627-1 ).

filming

In 2008 the novel was filmed as a Norwegian-German-Spanish co-production under the title of the same name, The Orange Girl . The shooting took place mainly in Oslo in Norway , Erfurt in Thuringia and Seville in Andalusia . The production companies involved were Helgeland Film from Norway, Tradewind Pictures from Germany and Jaleo Films from Spain. The film premiered in Norway on February 27, 2009 and the German theatrical release was on December 10, 2009.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klemens Kindermann: Seduction to Dream . In: Spiegel Special, October 1, 2003. Retrieved March 26, 2010.
  2. ↑ Production website
  3. ^ Website of the German film press service