The two faces of January
The two faces of January (original title The Two Faces of January ) is a crime novel by the American writer Patricia Highsmith . It was published for the first time in 1962 by the London publisher William Heinemann and, in a version shortened by 40 pages, by Doubleday in New York. The first German translation by Anne-Marie Uhde was published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1966 under the title Accident on Crete . In 2003 Werner Richter translated the novel for Diogenes . Both translations follow the original English edition.
A young American falls under the spell of a fraud couple in Greece . While the man reminds him of his unloved father, the woman resembles his unhappy childhood sweetheart. When a murder breaks out, he helps the two of them remove the traces and escapes with them to the Greek islands , where tension and increasing rivalry between the two men arise. The novel received the Dagger Award for best foreign crime novel in 1964 .
content
The 25-year-old American Rydal Keener is touring Europe after completing his law degree at Yale . Relieved of all work duties by his grandmother's inheritance, he has lived for two years now, writing poetry and waiting for the big "event". This seems to come about when he meets 42-year-old compatriot Chester MacFarland and his 25-year-old wife Colette in Athens . The man bears a striking resemblance to Rydal's father, a recently deceased archeology professor from Harvard , the woman reminiscent of Rydal's childhood sweetheart Agnes. When the love affair between the then 15-year-old Rydal and his cousin of the same age came to light and the girl accused him of sexual assault out of self-protection, Rydal's father had his son admitted to an educational institution. Since then, Rydal has harbored an implacable grudge against the dominant father and stayed away from his funeral.
In contrast to his venerable likeness, Chester MacFarland is a con man and system fraudster who stays in Europe to avoid police investigations in America. When a Greek policeman tries to question the MacFarland couple, an argument breaks out, at the end of which the Greeks lay dead. Rydal surprises Chester in the hotel hallway while cleaning up the body. Contrary to expectations, the young American does not call the police, but instead helps his compatriot to obtain false passports and to escape to Crete , where he joins the couple. Rydal is inexplicably drawn to the man who reminds him so much of his father. He is even more enchanted by his young wife, who makes advances to her compatriot of the same age. Chester jealously watches the liaison, which he cannot stop because he depends on Rydal's help and his knowledge of Greek. The escape of the three Americans leads to Chania and Heraklion . On a visit to the Palace of Knossos , Chester's pent-up anger breaks through and he falls an ancient amphora from a terrace on Rydal. He can avoid the murder attempt at the last moment, but the heavy clay pot smashes the skull of Colette, who is running towards Rydal.
The two men flee back to Athens, where they watch each other as a result. Everyone wants to take revenge on the other to whom he ascribes the death of Colette. Chester throws a Greek killer who turns out to be a harmless florist. Rydal does not dare to contact the police as he is too involved in Chester's crimes and fears his testimony. But he feels an indomitable urge to witness Chester's annihilation and remains on the trail of his rival when he leaves for Paris with a new passport . Less out of greed than to provoke Chester, he begins to blackmail the two-time killer, who has to digest the news from overseas that his fraudulent investments have been blown and he is financially ruined. Only when the French authorities arrest him is Rydal forced to betray Chester. He leads the French police to a planned meeting in Les Halles , but warns his rival and escapes himself in a parked van.
At a last meeting of the two opponents, Chester shoots Rydal, who asks for a souvenir photo of Colette, but misses him. That night he flees to Marseille in the hope of a ship passage to America and a new beginning in his homeland. He gets drunk until he loses consciousness. When the American comes to, he has been stripped of his last possessions and is taken into police custody. After attempting to escape, he dies of a gunshot wound. Rydal, who has surrendered, learns of Chester's last testimony, a kind of confession from the dying American, in which he confesses to the two murders and acquits his companion of any complicity. Rydal is touched by Chester's unexpected leniency, after which he no longer faces criminal prosecution. When he learns that the deceased will be buried without mourners the next day, he decides to go to Marseille to attend the funeral.
interpretation
After Highsmith had planned the book under the working titles The Power of Negative Thinking and Rydal's Folly , she finally gave the work the title The Two Faces of January , which, according to Andrew Wilson, is appropriate for the changeable Janus- headed protagonists. The action takes place in January , the first month of the year, which is named after the Roman god Janus of the beginning and the end. Just as Janus is usually depicted with two heads looking in opposite directions, Rydal and Chester also merge in the course of the novel so that they look like a single person with two faces.
Paul Ingendaay reads The Two Faces of January as “a man's struggle with the phantasms of his youth, relocated to another battlefield.” A young American obsessively relates the present to his past, looking for parallels between the different levels of time. He has still not got over his first love ten years ago, which was destroyed by the betrayal of his cousin and the relentlessness of his father. Now he comes across two people who not only resemble the ghosts of his past down to the last hair, but also unite father and cousin as husband and wife of a married couple. Until halfway through the novel, Rydal remains between father and cousin, torn between Chester and Colette, tells Highsmith the classic love triangle of a fight between two men for a woman. Then Colette dies unexpectedly, and the stage is left entirely to Rydal's argument with Chester or his father's ghost.
The more it becomes noticeable that the real attraction emanates from Chester, the more emphatically Rydal tries to hide this fact from himself and builds up the chimera that his unfulfilled love for Colette drives him to retaliation. But the truth is that the two men are like two street cats that Rydal dreams of one night, that bite into each other so much that they fall from the roof ridge into the depths. According to Ingendaay, the actions of both men remain related to each other like in a pantomime . It is always unclear who is actually hunting whom and who is fleeing from whom. Whenever there is a confrontation in which one could inflict the fatal blow on the other, the other is left out, as if the goal was to keep the race open.
Only at the end does Chester fail, lose the struggle between the two men and have to pay the price alone. In a final, related storyline, both protagonists are completely undressed, but Rydal is spared the humiliation of Chester's police station when he wakes up in the gutter of Marseille. Atypical for Highsmith's often darkly ending novels , hope sprouts at the end of The Two Faces of January . Rydal is not only spared by his adversary, but he also seems to be reconciled with his past when he makes the last escort for his deceased father with Chester. For Marco Abel, the death of the violent hero is a typical feature of many of Patricia Highsmith's novels, but it does not create a feeling of catharsis and justice, since in the case of Chester, for example, it does not correspond to the intentions of Rydal, the real identification figure of the readers.
History of origin
Before Patricia Highsmith finally moved to Europe in 1963, the American repeatedly traveled to the “old continent”, where her works were often better received than in her home country. Two trips took her to Paris and Greece at the end of 1959 and were inspirations for her next novel. Highsmith began work on The Two Faces of January in the summer of 1960 after her previous manuscript, The Straightforward Lie, was rejected by Harper & Row . She wrote her new novel near New Hope , Pennsylvania , where she and a friend rented a house. But this manuscript was also rejected by Harper & Row.
Highsmith later spoke of a "completely screwed up" first version, which differed significantly from the final version. Although the basic structure of the plot with the threesome constellation forged together by a murder was already in place, Rydal Keener was originally a psychopathic criminal, Chester a drinker and his wife Olga an uncomfortable grumbler, so that the publisher certified all protagonists with pronounced neuroses. In the early version, too, Chester's wife dies, but as a result of a jointly concocted murder plan between the two men. In her place, Rydal plays Chester's wife on the attempted entry to America, which gave the plot some comical moments in the style of Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot .
After rejection, Highsmith completely rewrote the manuscript while simultaneously working on the following novels, The Cry of the Owl and The Glass Cell . Harper & Row Highsmith's revisions were rejected a total of four times, until a definitive rejection in June 1962. Only a change to the London publisher William Heinemann made the publication of The Two Faces of January possible in January 1964. Again Highsmith had to revise the manuscript when the American publisher Doubleday requested a tightening of 32 pages to include the novel as part of its crime series Crime Club Selection to surrender. Highsmith saved a total of 40 pages by deleting the scenes around Rydal's girlfriend Geneviève and details of Chester's fraudulent deals. The English paperback edition of Pan Books also followed the abridged edition. The German translations, however, reverted to the longer original version, with Anne-Marie Uhde slightly shortening the text for Rowohlt Verlag in 1966 and Werner Richter in 2003 submitting an unabridged translation as part of the Diogenes work edition .
Adaptations
A German film adaptation of the novel with Charles Brauer , Yolanda Jilot and Thomas Schücke was made in 1986 under the direction of Wolfgang Storch and Gabriela Zerhau . In 2014, the novel was Hossein Amini remade . Oscar Isaac , Kirsten Dunst and Viggo Mortensen played the main roles . In the same year Charles Brauer read an audio book version of the novel.
expenditure
- Patricia Highsmith: The Two Faces of January . Heinemann, London 1962.
- Patricia Highsmith: The Two Faces of January . Doubleday, New York 1962.
- Patricia Highsmith: Accident in Crete . Translation: Anne-Marie Uhde. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1966.
- Patricia Highsmith: The Two Faces of January . Translation: Anne Uhde. Diogenes, Zurich 1974, ISBN 3-257-20176-1 .
- Patricia Highsmith: The Two Faces of January . Translation: Walter Richter. Diogenes, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-257-06409-8 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Andrew Wilson: Beautiful Shadow. A Life of Patricia Highsmith . Bloomsbury, London 2003, ISBN 978-1-4088-1157-3 , chapter 19.
- ↑ Explanation of the title on diezweigesichterdesjanuars.de , the page about the 2014 film.
- ↑ To section: Paul Ingendaay : Afterword . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Two Faces of January . Diogenes, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-257-23409-0 , pp. 415-423.
- ↑ Marco Abel: Violent Affect. Literature, Cinema, and Critique After Representation . University of Nebraska Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8032-1118-6 , pp. 113-114.
- ^ Paul Ingendaay: Afterword , as well as Anna von Planta: Editorische Note . In: Patricia Highsmith: The Two Faces of January . Diogenes, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-257-23409-0 , pp. 405-414, 424-425.
- ^ The Two Faces of January (1986) in the Internet Movie Database .
- ↑ The Two Faces of January (2014) in the Internet Movie Database .