The humiliation

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The humiliation (English: The Humbling ) is a novel by American writer Philip Roth , who in November 2009 at the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin published. The German translation by Dirk van Gunsteren was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in Munich in 2010 . The novel is about an aging actor who breaks down after losing the ability to play. Caught in his thoughts of suicide , he temporarily finds his way back to life in the relationship with a lesbian woman. In 2014, The Humbling , directed by Barry Levinson, was made into a film that starred Al Pacino .

content

Dissolved into thin air

The celebrated American theater actor Simon Axler suddenly loses the ability to act in his sixties. His appearances as Macbeth and Prospero at the Kennedy Center , accompanied by self-doubt , become debacles. He experiences a breakdown and is left by his wife Victoria, who moves to live with her son in California and is divorced from him. Day and night he can only think of suicide and the shotgun in his attic.

Axler is admitted to the Hammerton psychiatric clinic . He gets to know fellow patient Sybil Van Buren, who had to witness how her husband abused her little daughter and who wants to hire Axler as a contract killer in order to kill the denying perpetrator. After 26 days, Axler is released and returns to his lonely house in upstate New York , where he is visibly neglected until his agent Jerry Oppenheim shows up to offer him the role of James Tyrone in One Long Day's Journey into the Night . Axler declines for fear of another failure. In the fan mail he finds a letter from Sybil Van Buren, who is also released from Hammerton and thanks Axler for his sympathy. Like him, she seems unable to put an end to her suffering with a bullet.

The transformation

Pegeen Mike Stapleford, the daughter of a befriended couple of actors, who is named after the play The Hero of the Western World , brings a surprising turn in Axler's life. She, who has been an openly lesbian for 17 years, has had an unhappy relationship with a colleague named Priscilla in Bozeman , Montana who decided to undergo sex reassignment surgery and is now a lecturer at a college in Vermont , a position which she owes to a brief affair with dean Louise Renner. Now 40-year-old Pegeen wants to try life in a heterosexual relationship and chooses Axler of all people, her parents' 25-year-old boyfriend.

The love affair gives the actor joy in life again, and Pegeen enjoys the transformation that Axler, who finances her clothes, jewelry and visits to the hairdresser, takes place in her, but without being completely sure that her new way of life will last corresponds. The togetherness is only disturbed by the jealous dean, who inaugurates Pegeen's parents into the liaison. Carol Stapleton tries to dissuade her daughter from the relationship with the older and mentally unstable actor. Finally, Axler discovers the stalking Louise Renner on his property. He invites the attractive woman into the house to talk to her about Pegeen, but the dean accuses the actor of having erotic ulterior motives and runs away.

The last act

Despite his age-related physical ailments, Axler's relationship with Pegeen is sexually fulfilling. But when he learns that his girlfriend has cheated twice with players on the softball team, he suspects that he does not have the power to change Pegeen and to bind him to himself. Asa Stapleford is now also trying to influence his daughter against the older man. Axler avoids talking to Pegeen's father and convinces himself that the director of a provincial theater is just jealous of his successful friend. Finally he reads in the newspaper that Sybil Van Buren carried out her resolution and shot her husband.

More and more common erotic fantasies of women, such as 19-year-old Lara from the college's swimming team, creep into the couple's love games. During a visit to a restaurant, Axler finds the drunken saleswoman Tracy, and that night there is a threesome with the young woman, in which the man is increasingly pushed into the passive role. Nevertheless, Axler daydreams about a child he would like to father with Pegeen, and he is informed about the medical risks of fatherhood at his age. Full of optimism for the future, he even believes that he will return to the stage soon. But when he sees Pegeen again two weeks after making love with Tracy, she abruptly ends the relationship and subsequently declares it a mistake.

As soon as Pegeen left him, Axler collapsed again. He doesn't know whether Pegeen is drawn into Tracy's arms or whether she is under the influence of her parents, but the end of the relationship, which only he did not want to see, seems to him inevitable in retrospect. After he wrestled with his suicide for a long time, the loaded shotgun in hand, it is the memory of Sybil Van Buren's determination that makes him make his decision. He manages to convince himself that he is just playing suicide on the stage, and he sees himself as Konstantin Gawrilowitsch Trepljow in The Seagull , his first great theatrical success. A few days later the cleaning lady found Axler's dead in the attic next to a piece of paper with the last sentence from Chekhov's drama: "The thing is: Konstantin Gawrilowitsch shot himself."

Position in Roth's work

The Humiliation is Roth's penultimate work and is in a series of four “short novels” (short novels), which Roth described in an interview as a “quartet”. These are the novels Everyman ( Everyman , 2006), Indignation ( Outrage , 2008), The Humbling ( The Humiliation , 2009) and Nemesis (2010). The thematically related novels were later summarized under the collective title Nemeses (translated: " Nemeseis ") and, according to the edition of the Library of America, are under the question of how the individual asserts himself against the living conditions and what sometimes fatal effects his decisions have.

The subject of aging and death, of pain, illness and one's own impermanence, which occupies a defining place in Roth's late work , is particularly evident in The Anatomy Lesson ( Die Anatomiestunde , 1983) and Sabbath's Theater (1995), according to Thomas David but in the novels of the 21st century such as the dying animal ( the dying animal , 2001) and Exit Ghost (2007). As the starting point of the novel The Humbling , Roth described the first sentence in an interview with Tina Brown : "He'd lost his magic." ("He had lost his magic.") An experience similar to that of the actor Axler happens to him regularly between two Books, when he is looking for an idea and a subliminal panic overcomes him until “something happens” to him, the inspiration comes in a process that he cannot explain or repeat.

reception

The Humbling received a very mixed response in the English-language feature pages. Michiko Kakutani called the novel "an overcrowded short story" and "an insignificant throwaway work", Kathryn Harrison "a lazy job", and William Skidelsky "terribly weak by his [Roth's] standards." It is "the sexual fantasy of an old man, dressed up in the dress of literature". In contrast, Jesse Kornbluth described the novel as "Roth's best work in years". According to Aravind Adiga , it was "the most entertaining depressive book you will read this year." Richard Rayner read "a tight and controlled fever dream". For Elaine Showalter , Roth was still "a literary colossus, even at 76, whose ability to inspire, astonish and anger his readers is still undiminished."

In the German-speaking area, the reviews were mostly positive. According to Ulrich Greiner , the novel steers towards the narrative goal “with uncompromising severity”, although one “reads it breathlessly - and is in awe of the skills of this truly great writer.” Even when asked why Roth regularly passed over the Nobel Prize for Literature he found an answer: “It does not turn away (like all of Roth's books) the gaze from the animal, from the perishable and depraved side of humans.” Christopher Schmidt discovered Roth's basic themes in Roth's novel “Aging and dying, self-deception and neurotic masculinity, enriched with the ferment of an agonizing erotic travesty ”in“ merciless narrative consistency ”. For Albert Ostermaier it was a "novel of ancient power". “A leitmotif of the inevitability of misfortune in the face of happiness in the hands” is told in a tone of unspeakable sadness, a “tinnitus tone of despair”.

Thomas David spoke of a “shocking story of this brilliant novel that exposes all life lies and all illusions”, which shows “the fragility of human identity” and “the timeless tragedy of everyone”. Gerrit Bartels described: “The ruthlessness with which Philip Roth proceeds is impressive.” Even if he found “the porn scenes with the green dildos and the nine-tailed cats” strange. Hannes Stein drew parallels to its predecessor outrage and judged: " The Humbling is not a bit better and made a bit worse than outrage ". René Hamann also did not see The Humiliation in one of the “front positions” in Roth's oeuvre. But it is a “short novel that leaves little to be desired in terms of force, tension, laconism, wit, claim, etc.” The author remains “the measure of all things when it comes to sophisticated entertainment [...]”.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg: Roth on Roth . In: The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2009.
  2. ^ Philip Roth: Nemeses: Everyman / Indignation / The Humbling / Nemesis at google books.
  3. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt's monographs. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 126–127.
  4. ↑ Philip Roth Talks with Tina Brown About "The Humbling" at The Daily Beast on youtube .
  5. ^ The Humbling by Philip Roth at complete review .
  6. ↑ "an overstuffed short story, [...] a slight, disposable work". Quoted from: Michiko Kakutani : Two Storytellers, Singing the Blues . In: The New York Times, October 22, 2009.
  7. ^ "A lazy work". Quoted from: Kathryn Harrison: Performance Anxiety . In: The New York Times Book Review November 11, 2009.
  8. ^ "Roth's new novel is, by his standards, dismayingly poor […] it is more an old man's sexual fantasy dressed up in the garb of literature." Quoted from: William Skidelsky: The Humbling by Philip Roth . In: The Observer of October 25, 2009.
  9. ^ "Roth's best work in years". Quoted from: Philip Roth's The Humbling Is, At 140 Pages, His Best Book In Years . In: The Huffington Post, October 8, 2009.
  10. ↑ "the most entertaining depressing book you'll read this year." Quoted from: "The Humbling" by Philip Roth . In: The Times of October 24, 2009.
  11. ^ "A taut and controlled fever-dream". Quoted from: Richard Rayner: "The Humbling" by Philip Roth . In: Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2009.
  12. ↑ "At 76, he is still a literary colossus, whose ability to inspire, astonish and enrage his readers is undiminished." Quoted from Elaine Showalter : Book World: Review of "The Humbling" by Philip Roth . In: The Washington Post, November 4, 2009.
  13. ↑ Philip Roth: The humiliation in pearl divers
  14. ^ Ulrich Greiner : Deadly game . In: The time of March 4, 2010.
  15. ↑ Christopher Schmidt: Last presentation . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of March 8, 2010.
  16. ^ Albert Ostermaier : The nosedive of the seagull . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 12, 2010.
  17. ↑ Thomas David: The poison of the last lie of life . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from July 21, 2010
  18. ↑ Gerrit Bartels: Last Act . In: Der Tagesspiegel from March 10, 2010.
  19. ↑ Hannes Stein : After the indignation, the humiliation . In: Die Welt from November 4, 2009.
  20. ↑ René Hamann: Decay is shit . In: the daily newspaper of May 15, 2010.