The Levantine
Der Levantiner (English original title: The Levanter ) is a novel by Eric Ambler from 1972. It is a political thriller that takes place against the background of the Middle East conflict . The work was first published by Atheneum Books, New York; the first German edition in 1973 by Diogenes Verlag in a translation by Tom Knoth.
Historical background
The historical background of the novel is the Middle East conflict after the Six Day War of 1967 with its diverse personal amalgamations and power constellations in a region in which a representative of a certain intelligent breed of people, the Levantine , manages to get away with his life from the greatest difficulties, but easily because of it the rogue-eared kind has an image problem after his adventure.
Ambler's novel provides explanations for many manifestations of the Middle East conflict since its inception and describes exactly what is going on in the people affected by the conflict. The situation of the Palestinian refugees in their camps and the emergence of the fedayeen , their guerrilla forces and their internal struggles are described, as well as the situation of the Israelis, who founded their state of Israel after 1948 , and what role the British mandate played in this. Ambler never takes sides, but describes the historical facts exactly and distantly, but with British black humor , as they were perceived by the Western media in the 1970s.
content
The entrepreneur Micheal Howell, of very distant British descent with a Lebanese-Armenian grandmother and a Cypriot mother, from a long - established, very rich Levantine family , owns, in addition to other companies such as a shipping company , a factory for flashlight batteries in Syria, which is soon to be nationalized . The terrorist Salah Ghaled has taken up residence in a workshop in this factory, initially unnoticed by the company management. He was a member of the Fatah party and is now the leader of a guerrilla splinter group called the Palestinian Action Command that was ostracized by Yasser Arafat and other realpolitik Palestinian leaders . With a few comrades and the help of a number of employees who he threatened with armed violence, he tries to make his Katyusha missiles , with which he wants to bombard Tel Aviv from the sea, operational. The Soviets delivered the missiles, but no detonators. And the Chinese detonators that were ordered as replacements don't fit. So the activists try to tinker with a kind of adapter, but they fail. So they blackmail Michael Howell, the CEO and his family with threats of violence so that he can help them solve the problem. As an engineer, he might be able to implement a suitable construction. But Howell manages to hold off the terrorists and deceive them so that the attack on the Israeli coast from a civilian cargo ship ultimately fails. However, due to the perception of Arab public opinion in the Middle East and the political position of the Western European left press at the time, his reputation has now been damaged and his business activities in the region are done. Michael Howell therefore tries to polish up his reputation with the help of an American journalist, Lewis Prescott, who is supposed to present the story appropriately to the public in his own way.
structure
The novel belongs to Ambler's second creative period, in which actually normal people have to endure dangerous adventures without any involvement, proving their ability to act logically, their courage and their imagination in order to get away unharmed from their dangerous situation in the end. Right at the beginning of the book, Eric quotes Ambler from a dictionary to explain the term Levantines .
The book is written in the form of a report in the narrative technique of flashbacks with several levels of action, showdown and a shootout on a ship at the end. The different people involved tell the story in eight chapters from their experience in three perspectives. First from the point of view of the American journalist Lewis Prescott; secondly from the point of view of the entrepreneur and the main character of the story Michael Howell, and lastly from the perspective of the Italian secretary and lover Teresa Malandra employed by Howell. Each chapter bears a date and the name of the narrator, and so the narrative extends from a fictional May 14th to the following August.
Reception and criticism
In a review by Gunnar Ortlepp, published by Spiegel in 1973, the work was highly praised. Other media also praised the work as The novel on the Middle East conflict . In 1972, Eric Ambler received the Dagger Award in gold for the Levantine . During this time , the film critic Hans-Christoph Blumenberg emphasizes the total ambivalence of the characters and their actions, as Ambler has seldom managed to achieve up to now , and praises the balance between factuality and fiction . The book is also available as a Danish, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian or Spanish translation.
expenditure
- Eric Ambler: The Levanter . Atheneum, New York 1972, OCLC 831313348 .
- Eric Ambler, Tom Knoth: The Levantine . Diogenes-Verlag, Zurich 1973, ISBN 3-257-01513-5 .
literature
- Soraya Antonius: Fictitious Arabs , in: Journal of Palestine Studies , Vol. 2, No. 3 (1973), pp. 123-126 (review of the book "The Levanter")
Web links
- The Levantine by Eric Ambler on krimi-couch.de (review)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ethnography, Doubling, and Equivocal Narration in Eric Ambler's “The Levanter”. (PDF) (No longer available online.) In: muse.jhu.edu. Project MUSE, archived from the original on July 7, 2015 ; Retrieved July 5, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Bombs from Byzantium . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1973 ( online ).
- ^ Jürgen Lodemann, Südwestfunk Baden-Baden
- ↑ Gold 1972. on the Crime Writers' Association website
