The forger's tremors

The trembling of the forger (AKA The Tremor of Forgery ) is a novel by American writer Patricia Highsmith . It is about a writer whose life and values are shaken during a stay in Tunisia . The novel was written following a trip to Tunisia by the author between December 1966 and March 1968. It was published in 1969 by the London publisher William Heinemann and slightly modified by the New York publisher Doubleday . The first German translation by Anne Uhde was published in 1970, slightly shortened compared to the American edition by Diogenes Verlag in Zurich . The unabridged new translation by Dirk van Gunsteren from 2002 followed the English first edition.

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In Tunis , the 34-year-old American writer Howard Ingham is waiting for the arrival of his compatriot John Castlewood. Ingham is supposed to write a script for a film trio for the well-known film director , which has a relationship triangle on the subject. But Ingham waits days and weeks in vain until he learns from a letter from his friend Ina that Castlewood has committed suicide. Disturbed by the news, but even more so by the suggestion of an affair between Ina and Castlewood, Ingham postpones his return trip to New York. He rents a bungalow in Hammamet and continues work on his novel Das Zittern des Forschers , whose ambivalent main character, a fraudster who does good with his surreptitious fortune, resists the hasty classification into a good-evil scheme.

Ingham meets two men in Hammamet. Francis J. Adams is a 50-year-old compatriot from Connecticut whose purpose in life consists of self-produced propaganda radio programs about the American way of life , which are supposedly financed by ominous donors from Moscow. Because of his sermons on “Our Way of Life”, Ingham soon secretly calls him only “OWL” (in the new translation “Bead” for “values and lifestyle”). The Danish painter Anders Jensen, on the other hand, is a bohemian . His homosexual advances initially frighten Ingham, but soon he feels a kinship with the Dane. He is also the only one who can confide a nocturnal incident to him: Abdullah, an old Tunisian petty criminal, breaks into Ingham's unlocked bungalow. The latter panics and throws the first thing he can get hold of at the intruder: his typewriter. The Tunisian is hit in the head and remains motionless on the floor until the hotel boys drag him away.

The act is covered up and has no consequences for Ingham. Half-heartedly he searches for the whereabouts of the old man, but he only comes across a wall of silence among the locals. In any case, Abdullah does not appear again. For Jensen, the life of a criminal Arab doesn't matter. What worries him is the disappearance of his dog Hasso, who has already been a victim of animal cruelty several times. He reacts to his anger in images of slashed Arabs. Adams, however, speaks Ingham into conscience. He suspects his involvement in the nightly incident and wants to persuade him to make a sincere confession. Ingham leaves his bungalow and moves into Jensen's house, not least to avoid being investigated by his compatriot. But when his girlfriend Ina visits him, Adams wraps her up until she too appeals to Ingham's conscience. Ina cannot understand the change that happened to her boyfriend in Tunisia. In Ingham, who wanted to propose marriage to her despite the affair with Castlewood, the distance from Ina gradually grows. When she leaves, he knows that he has never loved her as much as Lotte, his divorced wife.

When his dog appears damaged but alive, the overjoyed Jensen leaves Tunisia and travels back to Copenhagen . He makes the tempting offer to Ingham to accompany him, but the writer knows that he must return to America in order to finally get his life on a firm footing. On the eve of his departure to New York, he learned from a letter from Lotte that she was unbound and wanted to meet with him. Ingham says goodbye to Adams and flies back to his homeland with a new courage to live.

interpretation

The Tremor of Forgery , Patricia Highsmith's thirteenth published novel, was published at a time when the author had already made a name for herself with psychological crime novels such as The Talented Mr. Ripley , Strangers on a Train or The Cry of the Owl . Nevertheless, Highsmith's American publisher Doubleday published the novel in 1969 not in its Crime Club series, but as a "straight novel", ie as literature that does not move within the limitations of a genre . In fact, the novel can hardly be called crime fiction. The criminalistic element, the self-defense against a nocturnal burglar with a presumed death result, would be far too thin to be able to carry a detective novel. Quoting allusions to the genre of the detective novel can be found several times; Ingham compares Francis J. Adams with Inspector Maigret and the "English investigators", but also with the investigative judge from Dostoyevsky's guilt and atonement , Porfiri Petrovich. In tone and themes, the novel takes up many elements that can also be found in the author's crime novels.

According to Paul Ingendaay , the novel is about "a profound disturbance that is missing from the usual Highsmith finale only the catastrophe." While Highsmith's protagonists are usually on a steep path that leads them with increasing speed into the abyss, the author treats the writer Howard Ingham almost has a happy ending : He returns unscathed, perhaps even refined, home to America, where his beloved ex-wife Lotte is waiting for him like a deus ex machina . On the way there, the novel does not show the usual increase in tempo, but rather, as Ingendaay puts it, "pulls the time apart and makes it tangible in a changed quality by depicting uncertainty, ennui and incessantly repeated gestures."

The different concept of time between the American / Western world on the one hand and the Tunisian / Arab world on the other is a constantly recurring motif in the novel and symbolizes the contrast between the two cultures. The loss of the American and the adoption of the Tunisian concept of time, which can be observed in the American Ingham, goes hand in hand with a general distancing from traditional habits and the mysterious fascination that the foreign and unknown exert on him. The unstable Ingham experiences the relativity of morality and the transformation of his value system, which was based on the concepts of honesty, loyalty and future. Like his fictional character, the forger Dennison, he recognizes the ethics that have dominated him up to now as the “forgery” of a morally corrupted society.

But the novel does not describe a successful cultural assimilation . The view of the western protagonists on Tunisia always remains a colonialist and largely xenophobic , which breaks the ground in numerous animal comparisons with the local population. Highsmith exposes the underlying racism of her characters, especially in the often striking prejudices. The parallel between the fate of Jensen's dog and the old Arab Abdullah becomes the central message of the book: The dog, whose disappearance is blamed on the locals, returns at the end, while the old Arab remains: “compared to an unimportant human life in Danish eyes with a Danish dog. "

A basic theme of the novel that is also personally important to the author is homosexuality . Like many of her male protagonists, Ingham has a latently homoerotic trait, but it is only in the openly homosexual character Jensen that Highsmith can explicitly address issues that were close to her heart: loneliness, libertinism and discrepancies with bourgeois morals. In truth, it is not the relationship between Ingham and Ina that forms the erotic core of the novel, but the same-sex community between Ingham and Jensen, who temporarily live under one roof and share a platonic moment of closeness in the Tunisian desert. In a later deleted passage from the first draft of the novel, Ingham accompanies Jensen to Denmark and there experiences the tolerant acceptance of homosexuals in his family, an experience Highsmith never had in her own life. In the figure of Lotte, Ingham's undaunted beloved ex-wife, she set a memorial to her own lover from the 1940s named Virginia, as diary entries and interspersed references in the novel show.

expenditure

Patricia Highsmith: The Tremor of Forgery . Heinemann, London 1969.
Patricia Highsmith: The Tremor of Forgery . Doubleday, New York 1969.
Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremor . Translation: Anne Uhde. Diogenes, Zurich 1970. Cover drawing by Tomi Ungerer
Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremor . Translation: Dirk van Gunsteren . Diogenes, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-257-06413-6 .

Web links

Review notes on The Forger's Tremble at perlentaucher.de

Individual evidence

^ Anna von Planta: Editorial note . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremble . Diogenes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-257-23413-8 , pp. 385-387.
^ ^A ^b Paul Ingendaay : Afterword . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremble . Diogenes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-257-23413-8 , p. 372.
^ Paul Ingendaay: Afterword . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremble . Diogenes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-257-23413-8 , p. 381.
↑ To the entire section: Paul Ingendaay: Afterword . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremble . Diogenes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-257-23413-8 , pp. 367-384.

[1] Anna von Planta: Editorial note . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremble . Diogenes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-257-23413-8 , pp. 385-387.

[ingendaay372-2] A ^b Paul Ingendaay : Afterword . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremble . Diogenes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-257-23413-8 , p. 372.

[3] Paul Ingendaay: Afterword . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremble . Diogenes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-257-23413-8 , p. 381.

[4] To the entire section: Paul Ingendaay: Afterword . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Forger's Tremble . Diogenes, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-257-23413-8 , pp. 367-384.