A day with Mr. Jules

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A day with Mr. Jules is a novel by the Flemish author Diane Broeckhoven from 2001. In 2005, the first edition of the book was published in German in a translation by Isabel Hessel, both by Rowohlt Verlag in Reinbek and by CHBeck Verlag in Munich.

General and formal structure

The book consists of a single chapter and is only further divided by paragraphs. The story is reproduced from the role of a narrator who, in addition to the incidents, also reproduces the thoughts of Mrs. Alice as inner monologues and the conversations, the latter being identified by appropriate markings.

The book has no dedication , on the cover it is introduced by a quote from the Tibetan Book of Life and Death :

“What we have made of our lives
makes us who we are
when we die.
And everything, absolutely everything, counts. "

- From: Tibetan Book of Life and Death

content

According to the blurb , Diane Broeckoven's novella is "about Alice and Jules and about David and Alice [...] a story about rituals, love, betrayal and loss, a loss that in the end is miraculously made up for."

When the old and slightly demented lady Alice wakes up one winter morning and gets up to have breakfast with her husband Jules, she discovers that he has died sitting on the sofa after preparing breakfast. Distraught about it, she wonders what to do and whether to inform her grown son Herman. She decides, however, to first say goodbye to him before she reports the death to someone. Accordingly, she spends the entire day with him without breaking out of her usual rituals , talking to him about things that she still wanted to tell him and about what she still wanted to talk to him about. Accordingly, she has breakfast and takes a bath, and during the day she does other small activities and thinks about her food, which she then forgets. In between, she sits down with Jules again and again to talk to him about various topics.

She begins her thoughts and her conversation before breakfast with the topic of dying, whereby she herself always preferred dementia out of consideration for the bereaved and wanted to die slowly instead of stepping out of life abruptly like him. After breakfast and the bath, a phone call tears her out of her routine; The neighbor Bea would like to send the autistic boy next door David, who regularly meets Mr. Jules to play chess at 9:30 and does not like any changes in his routine, to them earlier because her mother fell and injured herself. Alice agrees to visit without mentioning her husband's death. She suggests David to play checkers with her instead of chess, which he vehemently rejects and when he discovers that Mr. Jules has died, he plays the game of chess for both sides and tells Alice and Jules afterwards that Jules has won. Alice lets David open a bottle of wine for her before he is picked up.

After David is back with his mother, Alice tells her husband that she knew his affair with a woman named Olga and that she made sure that her husband ended it. She discovered the affair while on vacation 30 years ago and fell ill afterwards. She had never confronted him directly, "Thirty years it had been on her tongue, now it was out." She ponders what it would have been like if they had had a daughter next to their son. Later she thinks about when she should inform her son Hermann, but cannot bring herself to do it so as not to disturb him at work or later at dinner with his wife Aimée. With this in mind, she tells Jules other memories, including her thoughts about a miscarriage that she had on her honeymoon in Paris, although they did not even know she was pregnant.

Bea called again later. Her mother was more seriously injured and she asks Alice to take care of David together with Jules. Alice agrees and Bea sends David to her again. Since David already knows that Mr. Jules has passed away ("Mr. Jules is gone. This is Mr. Jules' shell"), he is reassured about the situation, which has no adverse events in store for him. After Alice asks if he's already eaten, he makes pancakes for both of them, and after dinner he starts tidying up the kitchen. When Alice looks at Jules' hands, "shoveling coal", she remembers her strict father and an incident where they had a bicycle accident together and he had taken care of his girl. That evening, Bea calls to find out about David and says there are problems and she will have difficulty getting home during the snowstorm. Alice calms her down and suggests that David can stay with her and Jules. She suggests David sleep in Jules' bed and they both go to sleep.

The book ends the next morning:

“When she woke up and felt the empty space next to her, she knew what to do. She stayed there for a moment, wrapped in the smell of the warm bed. When she smelled coffee, she got up. With her joints still stiff she went towards the scent of a new day. "

-

reception

When presented in the Spiegel, Marianne Wellershoff describes the book as “a quiet, at the same time loving and ironic story about life's lies and the courage to start all over again at the end of a life.” Marion Lühe from the daily newspaper (taz) judged that it was Book reads “like a parody of the sentence that life goes on”, which is soaked with a lot of black humor. She only criticizes the many metaphors in the book: “One metaphor follows the other, one picture chases the next. [...] A little less of it would have been more. ”She also quotes the sentence“ A lovely little book about how rituals help us to overcome great losses. ”By Elke Heidenreich , who made the book a best-seller .

According to the criticism in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung it is “impressive for Dorothea Dieckmann how Diane Broeckhoven plows a long neglected field of literature, natural death and the accompanying farewell to the survivors.” With her first work she has “a 'poetic plea 'of the farewell, which describes the naive, childlike way of dealing with death as part of a' peaceful utopia 'without false sentimentality and arrogance. ”Further comments praise the“ simplicity ”, which is a great advantage of this“ novel, in which emotions and rationality always find a balance "and she praises the" people who, although drawn with only 'a few strokes', are so 'present'. "

In Germany, after Elke Heidenreich's presentation, the book entered the Spiegel bestseller lists in February 2005 and remained in the top 20 best-selling titles for a few weeks until April.

expenditure

  • De buitenkant van Meneer Jules. The House of Books, Antwerp / Vianen 2001.

supporting documents

  1. ↑ a b A day with Mr. Jules. at Rowohlt Verlag.
  2. ↑ a b A day with Mr. Jules. ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.chbeck.de 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. at the publisher CH Beck.
  3. ↑ A day with Mr. Jules. , 1st edition Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-499-24155-0 . P. 81
  4. ↑ A day with Mr. Jules. , 1st edition Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-499-24155-0 . P. 92
  5. ^ Marianne Wellershoff: Book presentation on spiegel.de, February 23, 2005; Retrieved August 20, 2015.
  6. ^ A b Marion Lühe: Der tote Herr Jules review in Die Tageszeitung, March 12, 2005; Retrieved August 20, 2015.
  7. ↑ a b Review note on Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 5, 2005 on perlentaucher.de; Retrieved July 26, 2015.
  8. ^ Spiegel bestseller list of fiction 9/2005 , February 28, 2005; Retrieved August 20, 2015.
  9. ^ Spiegel bestseller list fiction 17/2005 , April 25, 2005; Retrieved August 20, 2015.