The life course of love

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The biography of love is a novel by Martin Walser published in 2001 .

content

The outer plot of the novel extends from 1987 to New Year's Eve 1999. The protagonist is Susi Gern, née Fahrenhold, wife of the Düsseldorf lawyer Edmund Alexander Gern , who became rich as a business lawyer. The couple has two children, the banker Andreas and the mentally handicapped Conny. Edmund lives out an excessive sexuality with several firm lovers, prostitutes and innumerable strangers; Susi, on the other hand, sees herself as deeply monogamous. Since she cannot have Edmund to herself, she too has changing lovers. Both live their affairs openly before each other, with Susi's constant hope that Edmund will eventually calm down and come back to her completely.

Various developments take place over the entire plot, which can be described as decline or decline. First of all, the Gerns' assets of around 7.5 million DM fell victim to Edmund's speculation in connection with the stock market crash of 1987. At the beginning of the novel, Susi and Edmund live in a huge city penthouse, own several other estates, luxury cars and valuable works of art; At the end of the day, Susi lives with millions in debt in a 60 square meter apartment on welfare. Edmund also falls ill with Parkinson's disease , which severely restricts him. A prostate ailment that he refuses to receive treatment also makes him severely incontinent. Even his insatiable sexuality suffers, in the end he limits himself to watching porn movies with his lovers . Susi is also finding it increasingly difficult to satisfy herself, her body is aging, so that towards the end of the novel she has already decided to undergo cosmetic surgery.

Conny, who has regularly provided Susi with a change of scenery over the years by traveling and secretly subsidized internships, is less and less able to be distracted from the fact that she will never find an ordinary job and will find a partner with difficulty due to her disability. It increasingly finds dull occupations and increases extremely. Andreas, who suffers from the terror of his mentally ill wife Ksenija, who at some point kills herself, turns from a senior bank employee to a self-employed investment advisor who helps with tax evasion, to a pimp and finally emigrates to South America in order to avoid the criminal creditors pursuing him flee.

Susi Gern does not give up and finds her - late - happiness even in the small. She falls in love with the 39-year-old Moroccan student Khalil and finally marries him.

reception

The novel was largely favorably discussed in the major German-language feature pages, but Walser's style was repeatedly criticized as unnecessarily lengthy; his tendency towards repetition tends to be talkative.

expenditure

  • The life course of love. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-41270-1 .
  • The life course of love. Read by the author (10 CDs). Der Hörverlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-89584-589-2 .
  • The life course of love. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-45539-7 . (Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch, 3539)
  • The life course of love. Special edition, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-41384-8 .

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