The buried giant

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The Buried Giant (English original title: The Buried Giant ) is a novel by the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro . It was published by Faber & Faber in 2015 . In the same year the Blessing Verlag published the German translation by Barbara Schaden. The novel takes place in the "dark ages" between the Roman occupation of Great Britain and the early Middle Ages and combines the Arthurian legend with elements from the fantasy genre. A handful of people set out to lift the “fog of oblivion” that lies over the war-torn land.

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Britain after the reign of King Arthur and his round table : The country is destroyed by the war between Britons and Saxons . Arthur's great law, which is supposed to ensure the protection of the civilian population, is broken again and again. The Saxons in particular suffer from British attacks. But a "fog of oblivion" ensures that people only vaguely remember the past atrocities of war and that the peoples live in a fragile peace. For individuals, however, this fog also means that they can hardly remember their own life, that children forget their parents and couples forget their common past.

Axl and Beatrice, an old British couple, are united in a particularly close love. But they are just as afraid that their feelings for one another could fade as they forget more and more, as that they have suffered pain in the past that could be opened up again by memories. Beatrice's dearest wish is to see her son again, whom they can barely remember. So one day they leave their village community, in which they are more tolerated than respected, and set off on a journey that is supposed to lead them to their son's village.

On the journey to meet them Saxony warrior Wistan and his protégé, the twelve-year-old Edwin, who by cannibals has been kidnapped and allegedly bitten, why has failed him his superstitious family, and join them. In fact, it later turns out, Edwin was bitten by a young dragon , and now he is drawn to more of the fearsome monsters. Wistan wants to take advantage of this, because he was sent off by the Saxon king with the order to slay the dragon Querig, who is said to be responsible with her breath for the mist of oblivion that lies over the whole country.

But Wistan has a competitor: Gawain , the last knight from Arthur's round table, to whom Axl himself once belonged, before he preferred life at Beatrice's side to royal duty. Gawain also claims to have been determined by his legendary uncle to kill the dragon. He takes a lot of time, however, because, as a group of grieving widows accuse him, he has not made any progress in all these years. It is urgent to him to eliminate his competitor, and so he betrays Wistan to the soldiers of Lord Brennus when the Saxon is staying in a monastery. Wistan manages to escape, Edwin joins him, and the groups set out separately on the path which, after various adventures, finally brings them together again at the dragon's cave.

It turns out that Querig is no longer the fearsome monster it once was, but an old, feeble creature that only lives because Gawain has protected it all these years. Because the order of the old knight was not to kill the dragon, but to preserve the fog of oblivion through her survival, which only ensures that the war between Britons and Saxons does not break out again. Wistan, on the other hand, firmly believes that one has to uncover the hidden and look the past in the eye. It comes to a duel between the two men, in which the young Saxon defeats the old knight and then also kills Querig. The buried giant, collective memory, returns and will conjure up new wars.

Axl and Beatrice finally remember their past and realize that their son died many years ago. The last way of the sick Beatrice leads her to a ferryman who is supposed to take her to the island on which her son is. A detailed questioning of the couple proves to the ferryman that their love has withstood the reawakened memory of Beatrice's misstep and her division after the loss of her son. He promises them that they will one day be reunited on the island, a privilege not accorded to many couples. But Axl still has to wait on the bank. While the ferryman Beatrice is translating, he walks off alone.

background

The Buried Giant is Kazuo Ishiguro's seventh novel. He appeared after a ten-year hiatus, which followed the last novel Never Let Me Go (Eng. Everything we had to give ). The English-language reviews were more negative than its predecessors, while other voices ranked the novel among Ishiguro's best works. While the first, arriving in Japan novels nor the tradition of literary realism were arrested, already was the third best-known book The Remains of the Day (dt. What remains of the day ) on an imaginary, mythical England on the presentation. Ishiguro's last novels When We Were Orphans (dt .: When we were orphans ) and Never Let Me Go were exploring popular forms of genre -literature, including the detective novel and science fiction . The buried giant continued on this path, which was often classified as a fantasy novel due to the fantastic creatures it appeared, such as goblins , ogre eaters and dragons . Daniel Kehlmann locates it “exactly at the transition point between historical and fantastic storytelling”.

The plot of the novel is set by the reviewers in the fifth or sixth century, floating between the epochs, as Burkhard Müller puts it. It is the period after the Roman occupation of Great Britain , when not only the settlements fell apart, but all of civilization. The few sources that have survived from that time have earned it the nickname “Dark Ages”. The Arthurian legend , which is based on the wars against the invading Anglo-Saxons , also falls into this era . According to Kehlmann, it is a time which, according to Kehlmann, requires a particularly high degree of fantasy, and whose zeitgeist cannot be understood without legends of "spirits, demons and archaic natural beings". Ishiguro emphasized the artistic freedom that the framework gave him: "Nobody really knows what happened in this period, and that was a great attraction for me."

In fact, for Ishiguro, neither the historical context nor the fantasy genre were the starting point of his story. On the contrary, he originally planned to set the novel “in a modern, realistic-looking environment”. He started work around the year 2000 under the influence of the Yugoslav wars and the genocide in Rwanda . His initial question was how it can come about that in a community in which people with different traditions have learned to live peacefully with one another, erupting memories of a long-buried enmity can trigger terrible violence. He solved the question from a specific historical context in order to tell a generally valid “ folk tale ”. Johannes Kaiser describes The Buried Giant in this sense as a parable . Daniel Kehlmann, however, objects that the novel is more than an allegory because it is "rich, ambiguous and as enigmatic as a dream" and the characters are not mere idea-bearing puppets, but rather "psychologically complex and contradicting".

In his own words, Ishiguro wanted to write a novel about “how people remember and what they forget and how they struggle with the question: when is it better to forget and when is it better to remember.” He has both the question Played through on the political level as well as on the private one. The warrior Wistan and the old knight Gawain are the opponents of the political conflict over injustice committed between the peoples. Wistan wants to uncover the crimes, to bring the "buried giant" to life in order to exercise atonement and vengeance. Gawain would like to cover the mantle of forgetting about past injustices so that the struck wounds can heal. Axl and Beatrice, on the other hand, are the protagonists of a love story that lacks the foundation of a shared memory. Their search for lost memories is given a particular urgency by the impending death of the old, which makes it impossible to postpone dealing with what has been repressed any longer. The lovers do not fear death as such, but that it will separate them from one another, and they hope that their love can overcome the separation. Their memories should serve as proof of their unbreakable love, which they want to present to a higher authority, a ferryman who is reminiscent of the mythological Charon . For the description of “the strangest and most beautiful death scene” in the literature of the last few years, Kehlmann only comes up with the overused word “unforgettable”.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas David: What Was Left of Realism . In: Die Welt from September 14, 2015.
  2. ^ Sebastian Groes, Barry Lewis: Introduction. "It's good manners, really" - Kazuo Ishiguro and the Ethics of Empathy . In: Kazuo Ishiguro. New Critical Visions of the Novels. Red Globe Press, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-23238-9 , p. 7.
  3. ↑ Alina Bronsky : Releasing the reading blockade . In: Literatur Spiegel 12/2015 from November 28, 2015.
  4. ↑ a b c d Daniel Kehlmann : Walking in the fog in order to displace . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 8, 2015.
  5. ↑ Burkhard Müller : The breath of forgetting . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of September 22, 2015.
  6. ↑ a b Sabine Peschel: Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro: About dragons and ogres . In: Deutsche Welle of October 5, 2017.
  7. ↑ a b Johannes Kaiser: Collective repressed guilt . In: Deutschlandfunk from April 14, 2016.
  8. ↑ Hubert Spiegel : Journey into Britain in the early Middle Ages . In: Deutschlandfunk from September 20, 2015.