The tenants
The Tenants is a novel by the Jewish - American writer Bernard Malamud , which was first published in 1971. The German translation by Annemarie Böll was published in 1973 under the title Die Mieter .
action
Harry Lesser is a Jewish novelist who lives in a Manhattan apartment building that is about to be demolished. He has published two novels so far, one successful and one weaker, and has been living on the proceeds from the sale of the film rights for 10 years. Now he is working on his third novel, which will be his masterpiece. Irving Levenspiel, his landlord, has given him notice of his apartment for a long time and tries again and again to bribe him to move. However, Lesser does not want to leave his apartment in order to finish his new work in the familiar surroundings, and with the help of the supervisory authority, he succeeds in being able to continue living in the house.
Surprisingly, the African-American Willie Spearmint illegally moves into one of the vacant apartments in order to finish a novel like Lesser. Willie gains confidence in Lesser's ability to judge and asks him for his criticism. The two celebrate, spend evenings together and above all talk about their work and works. When Willie revised his designs based on Lesser's suggestions, he began to neglect the Jewish girl Irene, with whom he lived. Willie becomes something of a 'student' for Lesser. A conflicted relationship begins between the two. This culminates with Lesser falling in love with Irene and her willie relaxing. When Willie learns of the relationship, he destroys Lesser's manuscript in revenge with the help of his friends. Lesser decides to rewrite the book. In his efforts to reconstruct the novel, about the end of which he is still uncertain, Lesser now neglects Irene. When she decides to move to San Francisco alone, a hateful relationship develops between Lesser and Spearmint, who both know about the other's desperate efforts to translate their own hardship into a work of art. There is a violent confrontation in the apartment building. Both lie in wait for each other, kill each other and still die in the hallway.
intention
Malamud himself opposed a limited understanding of the novel as a simple story about the relationship between blacks and whites in the United States. In an interview in the New York Times in October 1971, he described The Tenants as "a sort of prophetic warning against fanaticism". According to him, the novel pleads for the invention of choices to eliminate tragedy ("The book [...] argues for the invention of choices to outwit tragedy.").
criticism
The renowned Americanist Peter Freese writes in his article about the work in Kindler's Literature Lexicon :
"The Tenants combines an artist novel that pleads for an art that enriches life with a political parable that is surprisingly pessimistic for Malamud and predicts a race war as inevitable."
Expenses (selection)
- Bernard Malamud: The Tenants. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1971 (new edition 2003).
- Bernard Malamud: The Tenants. Eyre Methuen, London 1972.
- Bernard Malamud: The tenants. From the American by Annemarie Böll. Kiepenheuer and Witsch Verlag, Cologne 1973, ISBN 3-462-00934-6 .
- Bernard Malamud: The tenants. German by Annemarie Böll. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-423-10006-0 .
Secondary literature
- John Alexander Allen: The Promised End: Bernard Malamud's The Tenants. In Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays . Edited by Leslie A Field and Joyce W. Field. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975.
- Peter Freese : The Tenants. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Kindlers Literatur Lexikon . 3rd, completely revised edition. Volume 10, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , pp. 557-558.
- Peter Freese : Trouble in the House of Fiction: Bernard Malamud's The Tenants . In: Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, Hubert Zapf (eds.): Self-Reflexivity in Literature. Text and theory . Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2005, pp. 99–112.
Web links
- The Tenants: An Introduction . English-language introduction by Aleksandar Hemon . On: Work in Progress . Retrieved November 13, 2014.
Individual evidence
- ^ For Malamud, It's Story . In: The New York Times , October 3, 1971. Retrieved November 13, 2014.
- ^ Peter Freese : The Tenants. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Hrsg.): Kindlers Literatur Lexikon . 3rd, completely revised edition. Volume 10, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , p. 557.