The ballad of Typhoid Mary
The ballad of Typhoid Mary is a novel by Jürg Federspiel . The book was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1982 .
content
The novel is the free literary adaptation of the story of Mary Mallon , who became known as Typhoid Mary in the USA at the turn of the century . The novel begins with a prologue that describes the arrival of the Leibnitz , a neglected sailing ship, into New York Harbor on January 11, 1868. Mary Mallon, posing as the daughter of the late cook, arrives as an orphan. From now on, the action is from the point of view of the Swiss pediatrician Howard J. Rageet, who, after the death of Mary in 1938, takes on the case and uses the literary means of the ballad to literarily shape the few biographical data as a flashback . A New York that appears repulsive to the emigrants is shown, in which there are few winners and many losers. Cultural life is characterized by bad taste and decadence . It is true that medicine at that time was able to describe the transmission of typhoid , but nothing was known about the possibility that some people, as so-called permanent excretors, could be carriers of the disease without it breaking out. After some time, Mary takes a job as a cook, where she soon rises and thus transmits the disease to the New York upper class. The novel ends with the doctor's death, and a menu from a hotel where Mary worked is attached to his suicide note.
criticism
“To make matters worse, the book is pretty weird, sometimes like a good slapstick movie. And: it is told from a contemporary perspective, that is, from times that are safe in terms of health. However, the doctor who tells it, tells it today, is no better off than the typhus victims of his heroine. He dies of an insidious disease, probably cancer. The attempts to revive Federspiel's ironic prose are aimed at black humor. "
literature
expenditure
- Jürg Federspiel: The ballad of Typhoid Mary. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1982 (first edition).
Web links
- Slapstick with bacteria. In: Der Spiegel, April 5, 1982, p. 231, accessed December 8, 2017.
Individual evidence
- ↑ BOOKS: Slapstick with Bacteria . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1982 ( online ).