The greater part of the world

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The greater part of the world (original title: A Visit from the Goon Squad ) is a novel first published in 2010 by the American author Jennifer Egan . The novel, which breaks with traditional narrative style, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2010, and was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 . In 2015, this novel was voted one of the most important works of the early 21st century by the BBC's selection of the best 20 novels from 2000 to 2014 .

Jennifer Egan named Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and the TV series The Sopranos as the main source of inspiration for her novel .

content

The novel consists of 13 chapters which, in non-chronological order, cover a period from the hippie era through the punk and new wave years to the Internet age. Places of action include New York, San Francisco, Naples and a national park in Kenya. The individual chapters are told from different perspectives, there is no continuous storyline. One of the most stylistically unusual chapters is the penultimate, in which the young Alison Blake keeps a diary in the form of PowerPoint slides and documents, among other things, her brother's meticulous analysis of breaks in rock songs.

The individual chapters are linked to one another via protagonists and themes. Recurring motives are regret for decisions made once and the desire to build on old successes. The main characters include Bennie Salazar, whose varied career ranges from bassist in the band "Flaming Dildos" to record producer, and his temporary kleptomaniac assistant Sasha, who at some point turns her back on the music business to lead a bourgeois life as the mother and wife of a doctor. They represent connecting points to a number of other protagonists: Lou, a cocaine-sniffing music producer in the 1970s with a weakness for teenagers, becomes the mentor of young Bennie, who hires young Sasha as an assistant, who has a brief love affair with Alex, who in turn is later hired by Bennie to help his homeless school friend Scott make a comeback as a musician. Bennie's wife, on the other hand, works for the public relations manager Dolly, whose daughter Lulu will one day work with Alex. Bennie's brother-in-law is a journalist arrested for attempting to rape actress Kitty Jackson. At the low point of her own career, Dolly hired her to publicly rehabilitate a Latin American dictator.

Reviews

In her review of Die Zeit, Susanne Mayer describes Jennifer Egan as a virtuoso who designs scene after scene with ease, whirling up her characters in a fabulous abundance. It is a "brilliant reading pleasure", in which each story has its own protagonist and an orbit is roamed that leads from the grass-laden hippy haze of LA to the relationship dramas of a blended family on safari in Africa. Werner Theurich is also positive in his criticism for Spiegel Online : Jennifer Egan is a madly efficient writer in the best Anglo-American tradition of the well-made novel. Her characters would appear vividly in front of the reader's inner eye in a very short time, and their actions and thoughts would arise indirectly thanks to linguistically efficient means that never outshine the action. Even Sarah Churchwell is evident in her review for the British magazine The Guardian very fond of the novel. The mood of the novel changes with each chapter, ranging from melodrama to satire and farce. In individual chapters she finds reminiscences of David Foster Wallace's delight in footnotes and the art of speaking of Vladimir Nabokov .

Ron Charles fears in his criticism for the Washington Post that readers could be put off by the wealth of forms of this novel - but this would be wrongly done. Jennifer Egan would use all of the technical tricks and forms of the postmodern novel to tell a deeply human story about growing up and getting old in a society that was becoming more twisted by technology and marketing. The only point of criticism he criticizes is that this novel is not accompanied by a music CD that gives an impression of the musical styles appearing and commented on in the novel.

Publications

  • A Visit from the Goon Squad , 2010
    • The greater part of the world , German by Heide Zeltmann; Schöffling, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-89561-224-4

Single receipts

  1. ↑ a b c Book review in The Guardian, March 13, 2011 , accessed May 20, 2015
  2. ↑ Soundcheck Brooklyn - Review for Die Zeit on February 5, 2012 , accessed on May 19, 2015
  3. ↑ Jennifer Egan's "The Greater Part of the World": Beatings for the Late Hippies - Review on Spiegel Online from March 16, 2012 , accessed on May 19, 2015
  4. ↑ Review in the Washington Post, June 16, 2010 , accessed May 23, 2015