The ghost writer

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The Ghost Writer (also: Der Ghostwriter , English: The Ghost Writer ) is a novel by the American writer Philip Roth , which was published in 1979 by the New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux . It marks the beginning of the Zuckerman trilogy about the Jewish-American writer Nathan Zuckerman, which was continued in 1981 with Zuckerman Unbound (German: Zuckermans Befreiung , 1982) and 1983 with The Anatomy Lesson (German: Die Anatomiestunde , 1986). The German translation by Werner Peterich was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1980 .

content

The 23-year-old young author Nathan Zuckerman visits his revered role model, the famous writer EI Lonoff. He has resisted any popularity of his work and his person all his life and now lives, half forgotten by the public, in a secluded farmhouse in New England . There he leads a simple and meager life and tries in a daily oppressive ritual to produce literary texts which in the end cannot meet his high standards. Lonoff's wife Hope suffers from loneliness and joylessness after 35 years of marriage. She also suffers from a visit the couple hosts at their farmhouse: 26-year-old student Amy Bellette, who sifts through Lonoff's manuscripts for a possible donation to Harvard University . Zuckerman is immediately fascinated by the young woman with her disproportionately large head and strange accent.

After some kindnesses, with which the aging writer reflects on Zuckerman's previous attempts at writing and which mean a lot to the young writer, Lonoff lets his guest spend the night in his study. Zuckerman rummaged through his host's desk and library in awe. Then he ponders his own life and in particular his relationship with his father, a podiatrist who suffers from the rejection of a story that the son submitted to his father for assessment. Zuckerman's most ambitious text to date, entitled Higher Education, is based on an incident in his own Jewish family. The open portrayal of human weaknesses, especially the exposure of the greed of its protagonists, according to Zuckerman's father, not only sullies the family honor, but also the honor of all Jews. The father even called in the Jewish dignitary judge Wapler to exert influence on his son, and he accused his former favorite of hostility to Jews and put him mentally close to Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels .

Zuckerman would love to give his father the friendly appreciation of Lonoff for his work. But that night he wrote a reply letter in vain. He is distracted by noises on the first floor, where Amy Bellette confesses her love to Lonoff and tries to seduce him. He rejects her because, despite his feelings for the student, he could never leave his wife. During the night, Zuckerman fantasizes about Amy Bellette, heated by the overheard. Not only does she externally remind him of Anne Frank , he even thinks he recognizes the girl who was murdered in the Holocaust and imagines how she would have fared if she had survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . Believing that her entire family had been murdered, she emigrated to the United States, where she was surprised by the publication of Anne Frank's diary . In order not to diminish the impact of her contemporary witness report, she would have no choice but to hide her survival and never see her father Otto Frank again. Instead, she would have found a surrogate father in EI Lonoff.

In the morning, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette at the breakfast table and indulges in fantasies of marrying Anne Frank in her person, the Jewish girl par excellence, which in the eyes of his parents, Judge Waplers and every other member of the Jewish community, dismisses all accusations of hostility towards Jews would have to relieve. But he also realizes that such fantasies must represent a far greater blasphemy in the eyes of his family than his harmless story. Before Amy leaves Lonoff after his rejection, she triggers a marital argument between the Lonoffs with an ambiguous comment. Hope finally wants to leave her husband after 35 years of marriage, and cede her joyless life at his side to the young rival. She storms out into the snow and, after the car does not start, decides to walk to Boston . Her husband dutifully follows her, not without advising young Nathan to write down the events of the past day.

background

Anne Frank (1940) and Claire Bloom (2011) Anne Frank (1940) and Claire Bloom (2011)
Anne Frank (1940) and Claire Bloom (2011)

With the character Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth created an alter ego in whose life he reflected his own biography. According to Thomas David in The Ghost Writer, he satirizes the “heroic idealism” that determined his first literary works. Philip Roth called the novel a "pilgrimage to the patron saint of seriousness, to EI Lonoff". In the following novel, Zuckerman's Liberation , Roth lets his protagonists relive the reactions he himself received to Portnoy's complaints , which was a scandal-ridden bestseller . In Die Anatomiestunde, Zuckerman went through a life and creative crisis that Roth found himself in at the beginning of the 1980s. With Die Prager Orgie Roth concluded the Zuckerman trilogy with an epilogue that ends “at the shrine of suffering, in Kafka's occupied Prague”.

Franz Kafka is then also a role model for the character of EI Lonoff, and Zuckerman's pilgrimage mirrors Roth's own travels in the early 1970s to Prague , the hometown of his revered literary role model, where he met the Czech writer Milan Kundera , the Ghost Writer is dedicated. In contrasting the young Zuckerman with the renowned Lonoff, David identifies a fundamental conflict in Roth's literary work: the conflict between individual talent and the literary tradition that Zuckerman evokes in order to assert himself against them. In addition to Kafka, the figure EI Lonoff, according to Roth, was also influenced by the painter Philip Guston . His partner Claire Bloom , however, recognized a self-portrait by Roth in Lonoff and a reflection of Roth's farmhouse in Connecticut in Lonoff's secluded house .

In describing Amy Bellette, Claire Bloom made her own appearance as a young woman, and just as Zuckerman merges the murdered Anne Frank with Amy Bellette, Bloom, even of Jewish descent, described a striking resemblance between two portraits that Roth placed side by side on his desk had: one of the young Anne Frank and one of her own age. Long before The Ghost Writer , Roth wanted to write about Anne Frank, who for him was “a Jewish saint, a Jewish ghost”. When the novel was filmed by the BBC and PBS in 1984 under the direction of Tristram Powell , Claire Bloom played alongside Mark Linn-Baker as Nathan Zuckerman and Sam Wanamaker as EI Lonoff, the role of Lonoff's wife Hope.

Awards

The 1980 Pulitzer Prize Committee selected The Ghost Writer in the Fiction category . The Pulitzer Board overruled this decision and awarded the award to Norman Mailer's novel The Executioner's Song . The Ghost Writer was also shortlisted for the National Book Award .

expenditure

  • Philip Roth: The Ghost Writer . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1979, ISBN 0-374-16189-5 .
  • Philip Roth: The Ghost Writer . From the American by Werner Peterich. Hanser, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-446-13107-8 .
  • Philip Roth: The Ghost Writer . From the American by Werner Peterich. People and World, Berlin 1982.
  • Philip Roth: The Ghost Writer . From the American by Werner Peterich. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2004, ISBN 3-499-23862-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Rowohlt's monographs . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 108, 112.
  2. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Rowohlt's monographs . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 109–110.
  3. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Rowohlt's monographs . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 111-112.
  4. ^ Edwin McDowell: Publishing: Pulitzer Controversies . In: The New York Times, May 11, 1984.
  5. ^ National Book Awards - 1980 on the National Book Foundation website.