The Alice in Wonderland case

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The case Alice in Wonderland (Spanish original title Los crímenes de Alicia ) is a detective novel by the Argentine writer and mathematician Guillermo Martínez from the year 2019. It is set against the background of pedophilia and child abuse in the environment of a brotherhood that deals with the life and work of English writer, mathematician and photographer Lewis Carroll . With The Alice in Wonderland case , Martínez ties in with The Pythagorean Murders of 2003. His new novel was awarded the Nadal Literature Prize in 2019 .

content

The 23-year-old narrator and Oxford - Fellow G. - recognized the alter ego of the author - is the beginning of his second year of study in the fall of 1994 witnessed criminal incidents around which Lewis Carroll play -Bruderschaft. This plans an annotated new edition of Carroll's diaries. It is well known that the first four of the original 13 volumes are missing and the remaining incomplete; by whom and why certain pages were removed, still unclear. One of the missing pages is sorely missed - the one that may reveal what led to the rift between Carroll and the Liddell family, whose middle daughter he made the title character of his most famous novel, Alice in Wonderland . Exactly this page - or a piece of paper on which its content is summarized - has now been found.

The discoverer is Kristen Hill, a young researcher who was commissioned by the Brotherhood to look through Carroll's estate. However, she initially keeps the note and its information to herself; she fears that others could claim the find for themselves and wants to be the first to publish an article about it. G. learns all of this under the seal of secrecy from Arthur Seldom, whom he got to know and appreciate in his first year at Oxford as a professor of logic and hobby detective. Seldom is also a member of the Brotherhood and convenes a special meeting to inform them - in Ksten's presence - of their sensational find. However, Kristen does not appear. The night before, as a pedestrian, she was the victim of a hit-and-run car accident and is now seriously injured in hospital.

Seldom hires Inspector Petersen to put Kristen under police protection; the suspicion is obvious that one is trying to kill her (e). It is confirmed when a publisher and a journalist are murdered soon afterwards, especially since all three cases have similarities that point to Alice in Wonderland and its creator. A parallel is that they seem to be modeled on certain passages in the novel; the other is the photographs found on the victims - images of scantily clad or naked, suggestively posing childhood girls that are attributed to Carroll's photographic work. The pressure increases when such images land on all members of the brotherhood at the same time and it is also discovered that the publisher had supplied pedophile customers from the highest circles of British society with deceptively real-looking forgeries in the style of Carroll's .

Finally, the whole case is cleared up step by step in front of the assembled brotherhood. First, one tries to find out whether the photos point to a plausible motif and thus to the perpetrator - in vain. As expected, it is up to Professor Seldom to shed light on the darkness. The secret of the ominous note in Carroll's estate is also revealed. The last revelation, one of political significance, Seldom finally confides in his " Sidekick " G. in private, subject to the condition that he must leave England immediately afterwards.

Formal

The novel is divided into 33 chapters; in the extensive finale, two are identified as continuations of the previous one, and the final chapter is entitled Epilogue . This is followed by explanations and thanks , and Martínez's last note of thanks goes back to the introductory dedication: For Brenda, who transformed DEAD into LIVE in me - and from there, indirectly, to the Pythagorean murders published 16 years earlier , whose protagonist is him now awakened to new literary life, above all Professor Seldom, who passed away as deceased.

In addition, in the course of the present novel, the reader gets to know DEAD / LIVE as a puzzle thought up by Carroll and is offered one of the possible solutions. Elsewhere, the narrator leaves it to allusions to mathematical, epistemological and linguistic problems, which not all go back to the inventive creator of Alice . The cover of the German-language edition, on the other hand, is clear : the top hat and pocket watch refer to the hatter and the white rabbit from Carroll's novel.

Reality and fiction

Lewis Carroll's nude photo of Beatrice Hatch is the first to be served on any of the victims

The first-person narrator introduces himself as a doctoral student in mathematics whose secret love is literature and who, after graduating in Argentina , came to Oxford University on a two-year scholarship when he was in his early twenties . These are key biographical data that also apply to the author Guillermo Martínez, who was born in 1962. However, for his alter ego, he postponed his stay in England by about a decade to the mid-1990s.

This brings him into the immediate vicinity of the year (1996) in which the slip of paper informing about the contents of some of the pages torn from Carroll's diary was actually discovered; the wording of the sentence quoted in the novel also corresponds to reality, as does the location (the Guildford Museum ). Fiction, on the other hand, is the figure of the explorer, as are the members of the fictitious Lewis Carroll Brotherhood, which, according to Martínez, has "no connection" to the real Lewis Carroll Society .

As far as the point of view of Lewis Carroll is concerned, the arguments that Martínez puts into the mouths of his characters are pretty much the same as those made about him in the relevant non-fictional literature. With regard to the present novel, the controversy is exclusively about Carroll's photographs of partly naked girls in childhood, and in particular about the difficulty of judging conclusively from today's perspective how the Victorian society of the time and the families directly affected, like the girls and how Carroll himself felt it.

Literary context

The "Oxford Mysteries"

The Alice in Wonderland case contains numerous references to Martínez's The Pythagorean Murders , written 16 years earlier, renamed The Oxford Murders in the new edition . Since both novels belong to the same genre and are set at the same location, they are referred to here as "Oxford thrillers". The fact that the same main characters also act in them does not make their similarities complete. The most important of them can be classified into: a) offense, b) investigator, c) figure constellation and d) puzzles.

a) Both novels are about serial murders. In the end, both times this turns out to be a delusion. The deception is brought about by the perpetrator (s) following certain patterns that are closely linked to the main topics ( Pythagoreans / mathematics - Lewis Carroll / literature / photography). “The perfect crime”, it is almost identical in both novels, “is not the unsolved crime, but the one solved by a wrong culprit.”

b) The investigations are two-pronged: by the civil service (Inspector Petersen, police) and by hobby detectives (Seldom, protagonist ). The former rely primarily on physical evidence and psychological perpetrator profiles, the latter on logic. This proves to be superior, especially in the person of the logic professor Seldom (and strictly speaking only in the second volume, where there are equal opportunities). For Seldom himself, however, it is always Pyrrhic victories , because he has to reproach himself for having fatally increased the number of victims through his intervention.

c) In both novels, the protagonist moves between two worlds - one male and one dominated by women - whose overlaps are rather small. Seldom acts as a bridging figure to the former: a not too large, loose community, explicitly called "brotherhood" in the second volume and not dissimilar to one in the first (mathematicians). The female dominated world is that of the protagonist's amorous adventures. The basic constellation - man between two women - is repeated, as is the female type. Some (Lorna, Sharon) are direct and uncomplicated, others (Beth, Kristen) are more shy and difficult. The latter also turn out to be criminals. It is through them that the most important interface with the male-dominated world is established: They worship Arthur Seldom no less than the protagonist himself.

d) In both novels the reader encounters many puzzles. Most will be resolved. Including the rules of classical Whodunits according to which the plot belonging to criminal acts. In addition, there are playful puzzles that the reader can try himself: suitable for the respective main topic, a mathematical one in the first volume and a linguistic one in the second. Above all, however, the point here as there is that a real puzzle that has existed for centuries - the proof of Fermat's Theorem and the most mysterious loophole in Lewis Carroll's diary - is really solved. The first-person narrator , the author's alter ego , does not explicitly mention that this happens in almost the same place and almost at the same time , nor does the fact that several things happen in a fairly small time window - around June 25th - happens. All the more noticeable that he also puts the momentous Seldom's car accident, which remains a mystery in at least one important point (caused by him?), On this day of all times.

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes , role model for the hobby detective Arthur Seldom

Although Martínez only has two "Oxford crime stories", his investigative duo is clearly based on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson , who in crime fiction , especially the subgenres detective story and Whodunit , are generally regarded as the role model. The following parallels are their “lowest common denominator”: The detective (Holmes / Seldom), who largely acts as a soloist, solves the cases thanks to precise observation and logical thinking; his "assistant" (Watson / protagonist) acts primarily as a narrative mediator between him and the reader; the police apparatus including the chief inspector (Lestrade / Petersen) partially cooperates with the detective, but does not come as far as he or to different results.

The most important difference between the two detectives is that Holmes investigates professionally, while Seldom only investigates occasionally (“rarely”). In other, more minor points - smoking as one of the few vices, no recognizable love life - they are again very similar. In terms of style, Martínez Arthur Conan Doyle is probably closer than the majority of modern crime writers, which the critics, quite benevolently, describe as follows: "The narrative tone is relaxed, sometimes downright old-fashioned - and has a touch of soigned Britishness."

reception

In the Stuttgarter Zeitung, Georg Patzer compares the style of the novel with Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose :

"[...] Sometimes the crime thriller reads like an allusion to Umberto Eco's' The Name of the Rose ', in which murders are apparently also committed based on a literary model, with Eco it's the Bible, here the surrealist children's book' Alice in Wonderland. ' Of course, the book [...] is also a real, exciting crime thriller with lots of wrong and right leads, many suspects, a sophisticated detective work and a surprising solution. "

- Stuttgart newspaper

Sylvia Staude from the Frankfurter Rundschau writes about the book:

“In clever researcher dialogues, Martínez also packs a reflection on the fact that and how the social perception of Carroll's photographs has changed over the decades: Once they also found the parents of the children to be completely normal - perhaps with the exception of Ms. Liddell, who is the author and photographers suddenly forbade contact with their daughters. But later allowed again. Incidentally, there is no evidence that Carroll ever crossed the line of purely platonic love. "

- Frankfurter Rundschau

Marcus Müntefering from Spiegel online judges as follows:

“You can read“ The Alice in Wonderland Case ”without knowing“ The Oxford Murders ”[...] But a decisive attraction of the reading is only revealed to those who have read the predecessor. Because Martínez did not actually write a sequel, but a literary twin, with figure constellations, motifs and punch lines breaking repeatedly like in a kaleidoscope. A truly dazzling, witty pleasure not only for Carroll connoisseurs. "

- mirror online

Awards

Expenses (selection)

  • Guillermo Martínez: Los crímenes de Alicia (=  Colección Ancora y delfín . Volume 1460 ). 1st edition. Ediciones Destino, Bogota 2019, ISBN 978-958-42-7648-3 (Spanish).
  • Guillermo Martínez: Los crímenes de Alicia . 1st edition. Círculo de Lectores, Barcelona 2019, ISBN 978-84-672-7456-1 (Spanish).
  • Guillermo Martínez: The Alice in Wonderland case: detective novel . 1st edition. Eichborn Verlag in the Bastei Lübbe AG, Cologne 2020, ISBN 978-3-8479-0046-7 (Spanish: Los crímenes de Alicia . Translated by Angelica Ammar).
  • Guillermo Martínez, Angelica Ammar: The Alice in Wonderland case: detective novel . 2020, ISBN 978-3-7325-8791-9 (as an e-book).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The German-language new edition from 2020 follows the title of the film, Die Oxford-Morde .
  2. ↑ Guillermo Martínez: The Oxford Murders. Eichborn Verlag in the Bastei Lübbe AG, Cologne 2020, p. 119
  3. ↑ Guillermo Martínez: The Alice in Wonderland case. Eichborn Verlag in the Bastei Lübbe AG, Cologne 2020, p. 7
  4. ^ Sylvia Staude: Alice in the photo studio of Mr. Dodgson. In: Frankfurter Rundschau , June 18, 2020, accessed on July 1, 2020.
  5. ↑ Georg Patzer: Crime tip: "The Alice in Wonderland case": One assassination after another . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung . June 16, 2020 ( stuttgarter-zeitung.de ).
  6. ↑ Sylvia Staude: Guillermo Martínez: "The case of Alice in Wonderland" - Alice in the photo studio of Mr. Dodgson . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . June 18, 2020 ( fr.de ).
  7. ↑ Marcus Müntefering: Horrible void . In: Spiegel online . June 9, 2020 ( [1] ).
  8. ↑ Los crímenes de Alicia - Premio Nadal de Novela 2019 planetadelibros.com