The location of the country

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The situation of the country (original title: The Lay of the Land ) is a novel by American writer Richard Ford . It was published by AA Knopf in 2006 . The translation from American English by Frank Heibert was published by Berlin Verlag in 2007 .

The situation of the country leads the life story of the real estate agent continued Frank Bascombe and connects to the novels The sports reporter ( The Sportswriter , 1986) and Independence Day ( Independence Day , 1995) at. In 2014, Frank ( Let Me Be Frank with You ) was the fourth novel in the series. Similar to the two previous novels, Ford uses the preparation for a festival (after Easter and American Independence Day, this time Thanksgiving ) as a timeframe filled with the protagonist's observations and self-reflection. This longs for permanence, but many signs point to change.

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It's Thanksgiving in late fall of 2000 on the east coast of America . The presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore has not yet been counted, but 55-year-old Frank Bascombe, a staunch supporter of the Democrats , fears a victory for Republican Bush that will plunge the country and, not least, its real estate industry into recession . Originally from Mississippi , Frank has left his longtime hometown of Haddam, New Jersey , and now lives a few miles away in Sea-Clift on the immediate Atlantic coast. There he set up his own real estate agency, Realty-Wise , which employs only one employee, the enterprising Tibetan Lobsang Dhargey, who is torn between traditional Buddhism Dalai Lamas and American assimilation (expressed by his adopted name Mike Mahoney).

The longed-for "permanent phase" in Frank Bascombe's life - always being what you are - has been threatened by sudden changes in recent months: Wally Caldwell, the husband of his second wife Sally, who has been declared dead, is on the Scottish island of Mull reappeared, and Sally has left Bascombe to come to Scotland to work through the never-ending separation from her first husband. Frank doesn't know whether he can hope for her return, whether he's still married to her at all. The diagnosis of prostate cancer has raised the suspicion of imminent death in those left behind, even if treatment with radioactive iodine seed implants is effective. Frank's 25-year-old daughter Clarissa has moved in with him to take care of his recovery with her lesbian partner Cookie.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Frank accompanies his partner Mike to a conversation with the building contractor Tom Benivalle, in whose windy projects the Tibetan wants to invest. He attends the funeral of his friend Ernie MacAuliffe and is involved in the investigation into a bomb attack at Haddam Hospital, where he usually has lunch in the cafeteria. As part of the citizen network Sponsors , in which private individuals listen to other people's concerns and give them advice, he visits client Marguerite Purcell and recognizes her as a former lover. Finally he meets his ex-wife Ann Dykstra at the De Tocqueville Academy and is surprised by her with a declaration of love that he cannot reciprocate. Despite the suspicion of a family disaster, he invites her over for Thanksgiving dinner. In the evening he beats himself in a bar and embarrasses Mike when he is discovered by a police patrol peeing wildly .

The next morning he meets Clarissa's new lover for the first time, who after a lesbian phase wants to try it again with a man. Thom is significantly older than she is, a self-confident seducer, and Frank is utterly unsympathetic. He escapes his presence, shows a client a house for their old age and then lives with Wade Arsenault, the father of a former lover, when an old hotel is blown up. After a young boy smashed the window of his suburban , Frank waited in a nearby lesbian bar for it to be repaired. He gets drunk and when the accidental death of the son of a rival broker makes him remember his deceased firstborn son Ralph, he bursts into tears. He realizes that his entire life he has not been able to come to terms with his death and that he must finally begin to accept his life.

Frank's second-born son Paul arrived on Thanksgiving, and he designs greeting card texts at Hallmark in Kansas City , an activity that Frank cannot take seriously any more than his whole, constantly stupid son, which is why he is skeptical of his plans to get into his father's real estate business. To do this, he quickly takes his girlfriend Jill, who lost a hand in an accident, into his heart. In a phone conversation with Ann, who cancels Thanksgiving dinner, he realizes that he has learned to hate his ex-wife. At the same time, a letter from Scotland awakens hope that Sally will return to him. After screwing up a sales pitch, Frank learns that his daughter Clarissa had an argument with her boyfriend. While escaping with his car, she ran into a police officer and is now in Absecon prison . When Frank is about to leave, he is attacked by a gang of youths on his neighbor and is hit in the chest by two bullets.

Frank survived the emergency operation. When he is released from the hospital, he catches up with his children and Sally, who has traveled, for the Thanksgiving celebration and they bury a time capsule in the garden together. After his long life as a hermit, Wally Caldwell couldn't cope with Sally's proximity and killed himself. Whether she will finally return to Frank is still open, but she accompanies him to an examination at the Mayo Clinic , where he will find out whether his prostate treatment has been crowned with success. He arranged his funeral, but Mike's offer to take over the brokerage office has turned down Frank in favor of a partnership. He does not yet feel ready to retire. He now believes that not accepting Ralph's death is the missing quarter of his life, but living it out.

interpretation

The novel depicts everyday American life on the east coast with its various social classes, their views and behaviors in a rather meticulous manner. Frank Bascombe himself embodies the subjective well-being of the intelligent, critical and self-ironic average citizen at the turn of the millennium. His medium-sized milieu provides lively illustrative material and space for moral and political reflections on the state of the country . The novel gains its complexity through the linking of business, personal and political levels of action.

As in Independence Day , Richard Ford uses the real estate business of his protagonist in Die Lage des Landes as a polyphonic metaphorical instrument to bring the moral mood of society to life. The broker-client relationships serve as everyday examples of more general social relationships. It is not without irony that Ford succeeds in revealing the psychological disposition of those looking for apartments or house buyers based on everyday situations, under the premise of “living as an elementary need”, in order to respond to the moral extensions and personal consequences that arise from their decisions.

Although the basic mood of the novel has to be described as melancholy, Ford succeeds in using the yeast of irony to let the philosophy of life rise into a fluffy cake. Although Frank appears as a person of moral integrity, he is by no means as principled as the "permanent period" as which he describes his current stage of life suggests. By keeping many options open, the limits and principles of lifestyle appear more like working hypotheses that are tested for their viability using specific examples.

Formally, Die Lage des Landes is a straightforward, sometimes reportage-like book. His style is essayistic, his language expressive, yet conventional. Nevertheless, the story captivates through the psychological depiction of the numerous people, the photographic sharpness of the observation and the atmospheric description of the situations. While the novel therefore occasionally emerges as a model for American “creative writing”, it is nevertheless able to convince as a fragmentary description of the medium-sized milieu (the east coast of the USA) and its soul landscape.

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