The love of simplicity

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The love of simplicity is an autobiographical colored novel by William Genazino from 1990 levels.

Mainly on city walks in his hometowns Mannheim and Frankfurt , the autobiographer observes people who have stumbled with particular attention in this “investigation against bourgeois life”, extremely brooding, obsessed with details and relentlessly openly, and thus ultimately also a little himself.

content

The first-person narrator sees his long deceased father looking at a photo in which he was photographed as a distinguished gentleman towards the end of the 1920s, as a “petty bourgeoisie with a lack of expression and language”. The father, who was an unemployed mechanic at the time, had kept himself afloat with odd jobs.

The son's biography now extends from the 1950s childhood and youth in Mannheim, where he was born, to the time when the first-person narrator worked as an author in Frankfurt.

Little Wilhelm Genazino wants to become an American and registers as William Genazino in the lending library of the America House in Mannheim . Around 1955 the father worked as a designer in a construction company. Only after work does the man come to life as a designer of a new type of machine; "An elongated, somewhat misshapen thing". The then twelve-year-old son is pretty sure that his father's envisaged GEMA - abbreviation for machine factory "Genazino Mannheim" - will soon become a beautiful reality on the outskirts of Ludwigshafen . Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be. The father's machine, which was registered with the German Patent Office in Munich, has already been successfully registered in its essential functions by another inventor. In addition, the father would need large amounts of money and he lacks the commercial skills and courage of the entrepreneur . The hobbyist does not become an entrepreneur. As a result, the parents' marriage is unhappy. The mother resigned. Distraught and desperate, she withdraws. The older sister of the first-person narrator, who was already working in Mannheim, fled to the safe haven of a marriage abroad; more precisely, according to M., not too far from Frankfurt. The narrator shares next to nothing about the younger brother.

The mother dies of cancer after the father, when the narrator has been living outside for a long time. The story of Theos, the only Frankfurt friend of the autobiographer, is just as depressing. The poet Theo regularly receives his poems back from editorial offices and is forced to work as a box closer at the Frankfurt Opera . After Theo has lost his evening job, he sinks into a homeless person and does not accept any help from the embarrassed narrator.

Against this urgency, three of the narrator's women’s stories remain pale: First, the encounter with the neighbor’s daughter Angelika is nothing more than a harmless prelude to the subject of “man and woman intimate”. Second, the young person doesn't really warm to Isolde because he is hiding the catastrophe in her parents' home from her. The biographer fatalistically accepts his having to remain silent about bad family secrets as a source of his misfortune. And thirdly, the "troubled, stubborn" Magda leaves him as a bedfellow in need of love with a desire to have children, because she can no longer stand the writer's urge to be alone for several days.

shape

Some readers may bump over some phrases; for example about the right of every person “to an incomprehensible life” (this is the passage in which the crazy pensioner in the café changes her street shoes for slippers she has brought with her).

The structure is smooth and episodic. Some of these sections are quite short, but are meaningful in context. One of these “episodes” consists of only one sentence: “In the evening, mother liked to hold an egg in her hand.” The narrator is hereditary with the parents' resignation. He likes to generalize - for example: "Like almost all people who live in internal catastrophes, parents were inaccessible to any advice."

Especially in the last part of the novel, the narrator jumps back and forth between the two time levels “Frankfurt” and “Mannheim”. However, the reader can easily follow, also because he knows a little about the street names of the two cities, which are rarely mentioned explicitly.

There is a difference between what is written down and how the reader feels. The biographer wrote that after her death he missed her parents, but did not love them yet either. But the whole novel gives the impression that the writer has always loved his parents. Such a misunderstanding statement mentioned above is produced by a son who cannot cope with the death of his parents.

The narrator wants to become an artist, but gives up several times: as a singer without talent, as a painter, ignored, at the age of fourteen he is rejected as an actor by the gatekeeper of the National Theater. He diligently reads Marguerite Duras and freely passes on the results of deep psychological introspection to the reader: Actually, an introvert does not want to be sociable.

In the book, a document of a desperate person without a happy ending, the very quiet humor shines through in some places. The breadless poet Theo has padded the bottom of his mailbox with a piece of carpet. The negative responses from the editorial offices bombarded with poems are tolerably soft.

The not very extensive text is about having to die. Writing is an inadequate remedy for fear of death. Inadequate because the writer constantly lives in fear that in the face of death he has still not "correctly told" his story. The biographer lets the reader take part in his search for the more appropriate word - for example "death woe" for "feelings of death". The reader has to put up with a number of experiments by the narrator. The exterior plaster of a house is knocked off. The biographer goes in and listens to it from within. Or the story of the splintered glass cover of the watch. The “morals” of these stories are alike: dead objects suddenly take on a frightening life of their own under the writer's perspective. The biographer has an eye for everything; marveled at the uncomplaining homeland of the crows in Frankfurt. Some of the writer's projects - he would like to put into words the swaying behavior of trees in the wind - can irritate the overly objective reader. The biographer only brings up the title-giving phenomenon of simplicity towards the end of the work. In connection with his mother - the person he loved most in life - he shows that only simplicity can turn the being into a "closed person".

An example of the unusual relentless openness mentioned in the head of the article: the narrator reveals himself as a petty casual thief. He steals two tiny children's toys - trinkets, so to speak - in a shop and soon throws them away.

The son once wrote about his father's hateful behavior: “Father was not a Nazi”.

reception

  • On the inner contradiction of the conflict: Fansa proves that Wilhelm Genazino's big topic is the argument with the parents and quotes Gerhard Schulz , who says in his review of the novel: "Whoever writes about parents writes about himself." On the one hand, the discrepancy between desire and everyday life shakes the relationship between father and mother and is the reason for the son to strive for "predominantly peaceful opposition to reality". On the other hand, the father's professional failure and the failure of the mother's “petty-bourgeois life plan” are the starting points for the son's difficulties in “accepting life”. The son does not want to blame the parents, but rather learn from their fiasco.
  • Hirsch dealt with the parents' “inability to compromise”.
  • Discussions after the novel is published

literature

Text output

Used edition
  • Wilhelm Genazino: The love of simplicity. Carl Hanser, Munich 2012 (first edition 1990 by Rowohlt), ISBN 978-3-446-23959-3

Secondary literature

  • Anja Hirsch: Hovering luck of literature. The narrator Wilhelm Genazino . Synchron Wissenschaftsverlag der Authors, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-935025-88-2
  • Jonas Fansa: “On the way in a monologue. Poetological conceptions in Wilhelm Genazino's prose. “Königshausen & Neumann (Epistemata. Würzburg Scientific Writings. Series Literary Studies. Vol. 625), Würzburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8260-3744-3
  • Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): TEXT + CRITIC. Journal of Literature. Issue 162. Wilhelm Genazino. April 2004. Richard Boorberg Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-88377-755-2
  • Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German authors A - Z. 4th, completely revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 , p. 190, 2nd column, penultimate entry

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The established literary historiography does not yet take notice of the later Büchner Prize winner Genazino in 1994: For example, he has no entry in Wilfried Barner's 1,116-page literary history of the present ( History of German literature from 1945 to the present. CH Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-406-38660-1 )
  2. ↑ The older sister describes the father's inability to haggle as follows: In contrast to most other fathers, the father always came home from the black market empty-handed . She had to give up every last penny of the money she earned to survive. (Edition used, p. 159, 9. Zvu and p. 160, 15. Zvu)
  3. ↑ Even though the father condemns and rejects the son as "idiot" even after the publication of his first novel. (Edition Used, p. 158 above)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fansa, p. 76, 13. Zvo
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 24
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 76, 3rd Zvu
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 82, 5. Zvo
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 109, 11. Zvo
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 47, 1. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 24, 10. Zvu
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 143, 9. Zvo
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 74, 14. Zvu
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 23, 10th Zvu
  11. ↑ Edition used, p. 49, 1. Zvo
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 9, 14. Zvu
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 108, 11. Zvo
  14. ↑ Edition used, p. 114, 15. Zvo
  15. ↑ Fansa, pp. 76-144
  16. ↑ Gerhard Schulz, quoted in Fansa, p. 77, 2nd Zvu
  17. ↑ Fansa, pp. 80-81
  18. ↑ Fansa, p. 82 center
  19. ↑ Fansa, p. 95 below
  20. ↑ Fansa, p. 95 above and p. 127 below
  21. ↑ Fansa, p. 143 center
  22. ↑ Reference to Anja Hirsch's work at Fansa, p. 89 above
  23. ↑ Arnold (Ed.), P. 102, right column, center