The new confessions
The New Confessions (English original title: The New Confessions ) is the German-language edition of the fourth novel by William Boyd , published in 1988 . The German translation by Friedrich Griese was published in 1989.
The New Confessions is an educational novel in the form of the fictional autobiography of a Scottish film director who has a lifelong fascination with Rousseau's Confessions . The novel consists of 21 chapters and the plot spans from 1899 to 1972.
content
The novel begins with the birth of the protagonist John James Todd in March 1899 as the son of the Edinburgh anatomy professor Innes McNeil Todd. His mother dies in this birth. He grows up with his father, his brother Thompson and the housekeeper Oonagh. His only friend is a younger colleague of his father, Donald Verulam, who introduced him to a camera in his youth. As a result of poor academic performance, John is sent to a boarding school for the specially gifted; with John it's math. After a few years, he decides to flee school and visit his aunt Faye, who lives in the south of England, and for whom he has developed an adolescent crush. There he was seriously disappointed and made the decision to volunteer for military service, where he was transferred to Belgium in August 1916 on the Western Front of the First World War .
In Nieuwpoort on the English Channel , Todd first spends a rather leisurely wartime period in the stage , where he befriends Leo Druce, who will later play a major role in his career as a film director. When his regiment is transferred to the front in July 1917, however, he ends up in the middle of the hell of the notorious Ypres Battle , but emerges unscathed and meets his old friend Donald Verulam, who works as a war correspondent and ensures that Todd is given a job Cameraman for the War Office Cinema Committee. There he works on films for war propaganda, but when he shoots his own realistic documentary about the front, he is reprimanded by the censors and transferred to balloon surveillance. He fell into German captivity and made friends with his guard Karl-Heinz, who gave him bundled pages of a book in return for occasional kissing: The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Todd reads it in seven weeks and is deeply touched. “This was the story of the first truly honest person. Of the first modern man ... This man spoke of all of us, of us suffering mortals, of our vanities, of our hopes, of our moments of greatness, and of our mean, depraved nature. "The work will never let go of Todd and determine his future life.
Four years after the war, Todd works for the film company Superb-Imperial and lives with his wife Sonia in London . With the comedy Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes , on which he worked as a producer with his war comrade Leo Druce, he suddenly had great success as a director. However, the Superb-Imperial went bankrupt because of another disastrous project, and Todd moved to Berlin , from where he received a postcard from his former guard Karl-Heinz with an invitation. He manages to get by with odd jobs until an Armenian film producer takes a liking to his project to adapt Rousseau's novel Julie or Die neue Heloise . Todd brings Sonia and his little son Vincent to Berlin, but falls hopelessly in love with the American leading actress Doon Bogan during the filming. After Julie's great success , he convinced the producer to film the Confessions, a three-part film, each three hours long. The filming of the first part in Annecy and Chambéry takes on enormous proportions, Todd uses all available technical means and in the meantime begins an intense affair with Doon, which ultimately destroys his marriage. The introduction of the sound film , however, destroys all chances of commercial success of the film, the production company almost went bankrupt in the stock market crash in 1929 , but nevertheless agreed to finance the second part of the project. The rise of the Nazis in Germany, the move of Doon, who is a member of the KPD , to Paris and unforeseen difficulties with the filming ultimately ruin the project, Todd returns to England and has to face a farce-like production of 'adultery' with a prostitute to obtain a divorce from Sonia. The resulting film idea, The Divorce , becomes a huge success, but Todd is duped by Leo Druce on his next project and decides to return to Edinburgh. After several unpleasant and disappointing incidents, he finally went to Hollywood in 1937 .
In Los Angeles he moves in the European émigré community and works as a screenwriter for the Twentieth Century Fox until he, without knowing him, clashes with Darryl F. Zanuck and is fired. When he leaves for Mexico to have his visa extended, he is denied re-entry into the United States - he is later learned that it is an intrigue by Leo Druce in England, whose dishonorable behavior on the Western Front was later made public by Todd. When he returned to Hollywood in April 1940 after marrying an American woman , he made cheap westerns for years , including the first realistic film about Billy the Kid , The Equalizer .
In 1943 he found out by chance that he was being accused in England of leading a cocky life in Hollywood while his homeland was suffering from the war. He was transferred to the south of France as a war reporter and finally came to Berlin in 1946, where he went in search of Karl-Heinz and actually found him in the ruins of the completely destroyed city. Together they go to Hollywood to finally shoot the third part of the Confessions, entitled Father of Liberty .
While filming, Todd's name suddenly appears on the list of pro-communist activities of suspects, he has to testify to the committee for un-American activities and is blacklisted , hardly anyone wants to have anything to do with him, he can no longer work in the film business and gets by as an English teacher. After several years he finds out that it is essentially the campaign of revenge of the FBI agent Monroe Smee, a communist hater whose scripts Todd once called trash many years ago.
When McCarthyism slowly began to lose its strength in the late 1950s, Todd made the very last film, The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau , about the last hours of Rousseau. However, the film's premiere on July 2, 1960 in Westwood is prevented by a group of anti-communists - Smee is still on his campaign. When Karl-Heinz dies, Todd retires to a hut by the sea, but Smee also appears there. The private investigator Todd hired to clarify his pursuer kills Smee more or less accidentally. Todd goes out of the country and retires to an unnamed Mediterranean island. There he wrote his autobiography in 1972 and ends each chapter with a brief account of what went on on the island - how film buffs tracked him down (to whom he ultimately gave the film roles from the missing first part of the Confessions) and how he was to a former member of McCarthy -The committee runs into erotic misunderstandings with his old housekeeper. In the end he is "in tune with the universe."
Themes and motifs
In this novel, Boyd exemplifies three quarters of a century of political and cultural history of the western world based on an artistic résumé. Politically, it is the time of two world wars , the Weimar Republic , the German dictatorship and the American persecution of communists. In terms of cultural history, it is essentially about the history of film from German Expressionism to the introduction of the sound film, the production methods of the Hollywood studio system to the effects of McCarthyism on the American film industry.
As an educational novel, that is, as a story of personal development, The New Confessions is a book about the growing skepticism of the 20th century , the collapse of classic values and social structures, especially the family.
Boyd also touches on the development of the natural sciences towards a more skeptical view of the Enlightenment in the sense of a complete exploration and explanation of nature: chance as a decisive movens in the life of the protagonist John James Todd gives his life decisive twists and turns, while his actual Achievements - especially his artistic ones - always disappear in the background and wait for later discovery. In a similar sense, starting from early contact with mathematics, the theory of relativity and later quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle , Todd's insight into a life "in the age of indeterminacy and incompleteness" grows . He came to the insight early on: "Sense, order, structure, meaning - these are all illusions". Decades later, the skepticism will only be stronger: "I felt the tremendous indifference of the universe towards our fate."
As Boyd's already second novel For dessert War is the new creeds largely a war novel, the most intense passages deal with the events surrounding the big defensive battles of World War I but also with the inertia and boredom of the stage. In his later feature film Der Schützengraben (1999), Boyd took up many motifs from this novel.
The theme of the life of Jean Jacques Rousseau runs through the entire novel: Rousseau in his contradicting personality, his inability to bond, his ingenuity as a writer and social theorist paired with a neurotic personality structure corresponds in many places to the fictional character John James Todd.
expenditure
- English original edition: The New Confessions. Hamish Hamilton, London 1987.
- First edition in German: The New Confessions. German by Friedrich Griese. Zsolnay, Vienna, Darmstadt 1989, ISBN 3-552-04130-3 .
- Paperback: The New Confessions. German by Friedrich Griese. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-499-12901-9 (rororo 12901).
- Paperback: The New Confessions. German by Friedrich Griese. Bloomsbury, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-8333-0799-7 .
Web links
- Review in Time magazine, May 30, 1988
- Interview with William Boyd in Die Welt , December 9, 1999
- Blog on a detail about Todd's captivity in Weilburg / Lahn (plus summary of the novel)
Individual evidence
- ^ All quotations from the novel from: The new confessions. German by Friedrich Griese. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1992.