The tennis players
The tennis player is a short novel by Lars Gustafsson . It is the first book in Gustafsson's America trilogy .
expenditure
The book was published for the first time in 1977 under the original Swedish title "Tennisspelarna" by Nordström & Söners in Stockholm . The German translation by Verena Reichel was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1979; the paperback edition of the Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag has the ISBN 3-596-15648-3 .
content
In the fall of 1974, the Swedish scientist Lars, apparently the author's alter ego himself, held a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin , where he was mainly concerned with 19th century European philosophy and literature. This is probably his first time in the country and it has not been very long and he enjoys developing a completely different personality here than the one known in Europe. The biggest difference to his previous existence is the fanatical enthusiasm for sports that drives him to the tennis court every morning after watching the impressive Texan sunrise.
During this morning tennis training session, four people who otherwise have nothing to do with each other and know little about each other come together. Apart from Lars, there are Abel, a tennis player with a philosophy of professional qualities, who is said to have more fun training in unknown places with unknown people, Polly, who appears on the field as a rather inconspicuous, at most astonishingly petite girl, but later joins one Celebration at the university from ugly duckling to proud swan, and Chris.
The meeting with Chris has the most drastic or immediate consequences for Lars. Abel gives him a wealth of tennis wisdom, which he carefully notes and would like to publish as a book later, because he suspects that this is not about tennis, but about life itself, but Chris finally reaches directly into Lars' Work at the university. When one day he invites him over to his home, Lars not only learns that the young man lives as a patient in a psychiatrist's house, but also that he is a computer specialist who, as a rehabilitation measure, has a part-time job - in, of all places Fort Worth control center , where the airspace over Texas is monitored by computers whose memory is normally underutilized.
Chris' ability to access these powerful computers becomes important for Lars when one of his students suddenly threatens to turn the established research results on Strindberg's inferno crisis upside down. He brings his professor a book he found in the university library. It bears the title "Mémoires d 'un chimiste" and comes from a Polish natural scientist named Zygmunt I. Pietziewzskoczsky. This man introduces himself as a friend of Strindberg's acquaintance and later rival Stanislaw Przybyszewski and says that he and several other Polish anarchists rented the Paris Hotel Orfila directly above Strindberg and tried to uncover the secret of Strindberg's alchemical attempts to come by experimenting with narcotic gases introduced into Strindberg's living quarters. So if this book is to be taken seriously, there is a very simple and natural explanation for the “powers” by which Strindberg felt persecuted.
Chris now suggests, in order to find a match between these memoirs and Strindberg's own notes, to convert the contents of both books into Gödel numbers and then let the computer make a comparison. For this purpose, Lars gives him the copy of the Mémoires - without ever getting it back.
Just as Chris tries to track down the inferno crisis by means of data processing, a completely different crisis breaks out at the University of Austin: The self-assertive board of directors tries, as apparently happens regularly, to have the rector resign to force. Rector Perturber, who holed up in his office and found the telephone line to Mafiamanier shut down, managed to circulate an information letter in which the reasons of the board of directors for the blackmail attempt were given: Perturber allowed the choir and orchestra of the university to rehearsing Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold for a spring concert while the board insisted on Giuseppe Verdi's Aida - with living elephants in the triumphant scene. The board interpreted this as an anti-Republican action, as the German-speaking population in Travis County has a democratic tradition and the elephant is also the symbol of the Republicans - to which the board members belong. Perturber, on the other hand, interprets the board's wish to change the program as an attempt to exert political influence in the opposite direction. As the news broke, outraged student demonstrations broke out. The banners carry texts such as “FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM, WAGNER AND SOCIALISM”, “LONG LIVE VERDI: FUCK UGLY COMMUNISM” or “MORE ELEPHANTS ON CAMPUS: FUCK PERTURBER”. The European Lars comments dryly: I understood that this was a historic moment .
But the problem will by no means be solved by a political argument. The next morning's daily newspaper hardly devotes a word to the demonstrations and offers completely different headlines: The two driving forces behind the action against Perturber were guilty of desecrating a university sports facility during the night - and this is such a serious offense that it is automatic Rector Perturber and the Rheingold performance are saved. But the European professor finally realizes:
- You Texans [...] are a more interesting people than a European can initially imagine. The Australian indigenous people and the Arab desert tribes look different. You look like us, you dress like us, but actually you are a very strange, fascinating people.
But the December 13 newspaper reports something else that affects Lars: Chris' attempts to decipher the correspondence between the two books have crippled the air defense computers. However, this is not the reason why Chris loses his job in Fort Worth with immediate effect. But the fact that he is shown on a press photo with a banner that reads “GIVE US ALSO THE DUSK OF GODS ” prompts the authorities to look at his biography. In the process, they discover his SDS past and immediately remove him from his post. The book by the Polish chemist, apparently the only copy still in existence, is lost, the student Bill, who once found it in the tower of the university, has reoriented himself and started studying economics at Harvard. Lars cannot clarify the remaining questions and the computer is left alone with the problem beneath the surface of the Texas desert. This thought sometimes causes Lars to feel guilty .
The America Trilogy
The Tennis Player is the first of three books that refer to Gustafsson's longstanding teaching experience at the University of Texas at Austin and, unlike the novels Windy Narrated and The Dean, dates from the beginning of this phase of life. The contrast between Europe and America, especially between Scandinavia and the Texan desert as well as between the mentalities of the inhabitants, is much more in the foreground than in the later books.
While the main character of the tennis players still bears the first name Lars and otherwise seems to be a self-portrait of the author in many ways, “the professor” is never addressed by name in Windy Narration and never gets a word there. You are only informed indirectly about your person through the statements of the hairdresser; the little that comes to light, however, agrees with Gustafsson's own life situation at the time the novel was written: “The Professor” teaches at the University of Austin and is now an older man. Windy tells takes up motifs that appear in The Tennis Players, such as: B. the rampage of the student Charles Whitman , who shot numerous people from the tower of the university, but on the other hand has clear thematic parallels with the last part of the trilogy.
For example, the themes of nekyia , shamanism and, in general, the uncanny and inexplicable, which are told in Windy in the foreground, are repeated in the novel The Dean . Characters that are introduced in Windy Narrated also appear again in The Dean , first and foremost, of course, the Dean Paul Chapman himself. In contrast, the narrator, Spencer C. Spencer, in the Dean no longer has such unambiguous traits as the author himself told in The Tennis Players and Windy .
The tennis player conveys the impression that the Swede Gustafsson got from his host country America much more directly than the two later books about his phase of life in Austin. The grotesque features that the dispute about the management of the university takes on, however, are partly repeated in the later novel The Dean . Gustafsson's technique of integrating problems of European intellectual history into the plot of a novel is also taken up again here; After the inferno crisis in The Tennis Players , there are a multitude of references in Der Dekan to texts about inconceivable powers and especially about evil . In the world week , the tennis player was referred to as a "Texas Capriccio ".
Composition and motifs
The book The Tennis Players is divided into seven chapters. From the first to the last chapter the theme of Wagner is the leitmotif, in particular the theme of the Twilight of the Gods, i.e. the dethronement of institutionalized powers. The intellectual distance between Europeans and Americans, which Lars allegedly only opens up after the scandal in the stadium, is a recurring motif, and you can already read in the first chapter:
- One has to be careful when telling American students about Nietzsche. Otherwise it can easily happen to you to teach them that Friedrich Nietzsche was a German with a big mustache who invented the auxiliary police.
The motif of sport is linked to this motif of being foreign and different. Lars not only changes his personality compared to what he is used to from himself in Europe by becoming downright tennis addict, and not only tries to find guidelines for the whole of human life in Abel's statements about tennis. He also philosophizes about the background and the future of the game of frisbee and about the enthusiasm for sports among Americans in general, which leads to a kind of idolatry and ultimately becomes disastrous for the board members. In the second chapter you can read:
- The fascination of the students had a different story. And that was one of the things that helped make her seem a little strange to me.
- Whenever the Texas Longhorns football team won a game, the spire would be illuminated with powerful red spotlights, which undoubtedly made it look like a hugely erect male member, an ecstatic phallus ...
literature
- Martin Lüdke on Lars Gustafsson: Language and Lies . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1981, pp. 168 ( online ).
- Mario Leis: Sport in Literature. Aspects of selected sports motifs in the 20th century , dissertation at the University of Siegen April 14, 1999, DNB 957062451 ( online, PDF 1.2 MB, 241 pages ).