The red cat (novel)
The novel The Red Cat (originally in Vallader Il giat cotschen , pronunciation [ il ˌjat ˈkɔt͡ʃən ]) is the last novel by the Lower Engadine writer Jon Semadeni . It is about the aging lawyer and village politician Chispar Rubar, who is overtaken by his criminal past.
action
Framework story
In the framework of the story , the lawyer and village politician Chispar Rubar walks through the mountainous hinterland of an unnamed village in the Lower Engadine. He spends most of the time alone, once he meets a border guard. Various places he passes remind him of earlier events.
Internal act
The young law student Chispar Rubar falls in love with Ria, a young woman from the neighborhood. However, the love is blocked by the Rubar parents because the relationship is not befitting.
A generation later - Chispar Rubar has meanwhile been married to another woman, happily and without children - Ria's daughter becomes Chispar Rubar's domestic servant. One evening Chispar Rubar sleeps with the young woman and she becomes pregnant.
Chispar Rubar spreads the rumor that the young woman is pregnant by a Tyrolean servant and uses a ruse to make sure that he leaves the valley. This gives the rumor plausibility.
But the young woman's father sees through what is going on and defends himself. Chispar Rubar feels cornered by him, lies in wait for him in the mountains and shoots him completely drunk. In his drunkenness he tells the whole story to his tenant and his son, whom he meets in a dugout in the pouring rain.
Sober again, he blackmailed the tenant and son. He thus escaped legal prosecution, so that he emerged successfully from the election shortly afterwards.
Location
For the reader without any special local knowledge, the novel is located in the Alpine region. Romanesque-sounding toponyms and later the mention of the Austrian border make Graubünden a likely place of action. Names of villages, towns or rivers are not given.
In fact, the field names mentioned in the text refer to locations in the area of the former municipality of Ramosch , now Valsot . The church of Padval , mentioned several times, means the small church of Vnà . The murder takes place somewhere below the Piz Tschütta mentioned by name, Ramosch's local mountain.
genre
The novel is a detective novel insofar as a criminal case is at the center and this criminal case is resolved in the course of the novel from many pieces of the puzzle.
However, it is not a classic Whodunit novel, in which the reader, in alternating alliance with the protagonists, cheers for the clarification of the case. Rather, the focus here is on considering conflict and motivation from a psychological position. It is about individual and supra-individual past. The tension arises, unlike in the Whodunit novel, from the fragmentary, non-chronological presentation of the events in the form of often veiling transformations and condensates.
title
Chispar Rubar's parents turned their Engadin farmhouse into a restaurant when Chispar Rubar was still a child. As part of this renovation, a mummified red cat becomes visible when a wall is torn down. Such so-called building sacrifices were common in earlier times in the area in which the novel is set. The exposure of the building sacrifice comes close to breaking a taboo, and those involved behave with their soul drink ( palorma ) similar to the death of a person or the shooting of an animal while hunting.
The emblem of the red cat appears repeatedly in the novel not only as a real red cat during the renovation work, but also in a trance and intoxicated with alcohol. The emblem also appears as a red fox and finally points to the man from Ria who, when he was shot by Chispar Rubar, was carrying "something reddish brown [on his] back" .
Construction victims always play a role in literary terms. An example of this is the dike victims in the novella Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm . In Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Black Cat , Pluto the cat is walled up in a cellar wall.
backgrounds
The theme of the novel is the emotional past - both the individual and that of society - which, according to its character, is always present and has never really passed. Chispar Rubar compares the memory, a remaining vessel of the past, to a parchment:
“ Mia memoria es üna pergiamina schmarida. I mancan pleds, i mancan lingias, i mancan fögls: Ün hom stuorn dà da la bratscha. Marionetta ridicula! "
“My memory is a faded parchment. The words are missing, the lines are missing, the leaves are missing: a drunk man rowing his arms. Ridiculous puppet! "
The title motif of the red cat, hidden in the masonry for decades or centuries, is a metaphor for the past that can break out again at any time.
As far as the background of the novel The Red Cat is concerned, there are connections to Jon Semadeni's work La Jürada from 1967: There, too, it is about the emotional past and the question of how far it really becomes the past and to what extent it always remains present:
“ Eu craj cha per l'orma nu detta ingün passà. "
"I believe that there is no past for the soul."
In this Freudian view, the red cat stands for the guilty conscience, which in the end cannot be walled in and, despite all attempts, comes to light again at some point. However, the red cat in the novel does not appear after the fact as a metaphor for the guilty conscience, but as a omen that foreshadows the future of the still innocent boy. With regard to a differentiated classification of the detective novel, on the one hand the genre of the modern psychological novel offers itself, on the other hand also the genre of the ancient Greek tragedy , in which the protagonist fatefully and inevitably approaches the disaster. This second classification, which presupposes a supraindividual guilt, a guilt of the whole sex, is supported in various places in the novel.
The research also establishes a connection between the dishonouring of the young woman and the sale of the Engadin homeland by the economically believing politician Chispar Rubar. Jon Semadeni himself was sometimes critical of the belief in the economy.
Work history
The work was published by Mengia Semadeni in Samedan in January 1980 , one year before Jon Semadeni's death. This first publication of the novel was monolingual in Romansh ( Idiom Vallader ).
A few days after the book was published, the material was also published on Radio Rumantsch as a radio play in two episodes, under the name Tarablas da la not (German night stories ). While the book is mostly designed as a monologue and only a small part as a conversation with an (unnamed) border guard, the story in the radio play appears as a dialogue between Chispar Rubar and the border guard named Duri.
In 1998 the Limmat-Verlag in Zurich published the bilingual edition "Die rote Katzen / Il giat cotschen" , with the translation by Mevina Puorger and Franz Cavigelli.
Primary literature
- Jon Semadeni: Il giat cotschen . Samedan, Mengia Semadeni, 1980.
- Jon Semadeni: The red cat / Il giat cotschen . Limmat-Verlag, Zurich, 1998. ISBN 978-3857913211 .
Secondary literature
- Clà Riatsch : Figüras da la memoria illa prosa da Jon Semadeni. University of Zurich, 2011.
- Ursina Guldemond-Netzer: Transpositions ainten l'ovra da Jon Semadeni: “Famiglia Rubar” - “Il giat cotschen” - “Tarablas da la not”. Dissertation. Friborg 2002.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Cla Riatsch: Figüras da la memoria illa prosa da Jon Semadeni . 2011, University of Zurich.
- ↑ 1998, p. 43.
- ↑ The red cat is still haunted. I meet her every evening. 1998, p. 43.
- ↑ Is that the cat beast that tried to attack me earlier? , 1998, p. 81.
- ↑ I've been all too much a Rubar and have sacrificed everything to my ambition. 1998, p. 23. My father has left the Rubars' insatiable thirst to me. P. 49.
- ↑ Annetta Ganzoni: For securing evidence of a political crime thriller - Notes on the literary estate of Jon Semadeni , 2002/2003.
- ↑ Tarablas da la not ( Memento of the original dated November 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from January 5, 1980 at Radiotelevisiun Rumantscha, accessed on November 10, 2013.
- ↑ Tarablas da la not ( Memento of the original dated November 11, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from January 12, 1980 at Radiotelevisiun Rumantscha, accessed on November 10, 2013.
