The Samurai of Savannah
The Samurai of Savannah (English: East is East ) is a novel by TC Boyle from 1990. The German translation by Werner Richter was published in 1992 by Carl Hanser Verlag .
action
It tells the story of a half-Japanese man who worked as a cook on a freighter. He jumps overboard on the Georgia coast to find his American father, whom he only knows lives in a city in the United States . The novel illuminates the events that occurred as a result of this shore leave from several perspectives. The protagonist swims on an island on which a group of art scholars live whose thinking and everyday life are fundamentally different from that of the Japanese. He gets caught up in a whirlpool of deep cultural misunderstandings with the artists, but also with other residents of the island, as well as with officials from the immigration authorities. Special features of the novel are its polyphony with very different interpretations and perspectives as well as an extraordinarily dense atmosphere, which makes a part of the USA that is little known to us vivid.
literature
- Tom Coraghessan Boyle: The Samurai of Savannah. Novel . Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich and Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-446-16211-9 (English: East is East . Translated by Werner Richter).
criticism
In a review of the novel published in Die Zeit in 2009 , Barbara Sichtermann wrote : “ Boyle packs an abundance of motifs that stand for the problematic America of today in this 400-page story of the wandering of a stranger: the Japanese danger, the tenacity of the The myth of the melting pot, racism, the need to succeed, the joys of beating one another, ubiquitous violence. [...] Unconcerned about the message that eventually drips out of the lines by itself, and fully focused on the effect, Boyle tears down his opulent show, talks, gesticulates, mocks, yells and howls that one has to sigh: Happy America Where there is still a story ... Boyle opens each chapter with a cinematic action or mood scene, but never fails to surprisingly combine the variety of episodes and locations with the odyssey of his unfortunate hero. There is nothing to complain about, that is formally brilliantly solved, the content is acute and of tomorrow and on top of that so exciting that one does not like to interrupt the reading. "
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Samurai in the zombie circus . In: Die Zeit, October 2, 1992. Retrieved October 1, 2013.