Elephant memory
Elephant Memory ( Portuguese Memória de elefante ) is the first novel by António Lobo Antunes . The novel, published in 1979, is about a day in the life of a psychiatrist in the Lisbon institution Miguel Bombarda and is characterized by his cynical reflections on his employees, his family and the self-critical coming to terms with a failed marriage.
Classification in the overall work
In contrast to his other novels, Antunes uses an external, anonymous narrator in “Elefantengedächtnis”, who speaks of the doctor in the third person. From the second novel, Judaskuss , he reaches the height of his inner monologues. The power of language, its seemingly baroque , far-fetched metaphor and unusual, rampant comparisons can also be found in the novel "Elephant Memory". As in all later novels, Antunes unfolds a prose of simultaneity from the here and now, memories, reflections and associations. As in Good evening you things down here , Antunes deals with the lost Angola War in his debut, describes the decline of an upper-class family, like that of the Valadas in Antune's novel The Natural Order of Things . Similar topics about the mentally ill, like crazy train freaks and Mongoloid people with incest biographies , he takes up again in the novel about the decline of the family in the dance of the damned . Here, too, the novel begins with the reality of a doctor's life, but there are nine other monologue guides. As in the elephant memory, the Inquisitor's Handbook deals with the separation of marriage. In short, all the themes of his memoirs of the later novels are already laid out in the debut.
construction
The novel is divided into ten unmarked chapters, which are separated by a page break. The framework action takes place on one day from morning to the next morning. Several song texts and poems in stanzas are inserted.
content
The plot is anti-realistic and takes place as a psychologizing, sequential picture of Portugal and its inhabitants, this is misogynous, full of self-loathing, the majority are bitter cynical comparisons, stringing together of exact observations, sentimental reviews of the marriage that was divorced in March.
Nevertheless, there is a subordinate framework that serves as a vehicle for the associative elements. The unspecified doctor enters the Miguel Bombarda clinic at the start of work, meets numerous bizarre characters, after a nurse Charlotte Bronte has assisted him and documents have been filled out and he is sitting alone in his office again, he calls his friend a doctor and arranges to meet at lunchtime on the grounds that he has reached the bottom. A couple of parents come to the consultation hour and would like to have their son forcibly delivered, it turns out that this is completely unnecessary and it is only their overburdening with the normal late pubescent excesses of a seventeen year old. After the conversation was very one-sided without the parents, with the anxious "ferret" sitting in the consulting room and looking out the window in silence without reacting to the doctor, he accompanied the family out of the hospital and got into his car, which he called very personal mini bunker and which introduces new chapters of this odyssey at several points.
It is interesting that Antunes also compares himself with other writers in the comparisons here in his first work; his friend the doctor with whom he has lunch and whom he can pour out his heart becomes Max Brod , who publishes it to Franz Kafka after death should. The list of writers continues with Umberto Eco , who should be consulted, Agatha Christie is mentioned, Federico Fellini is quoted and several greats in the cultural history of Portugal. The assumption that it is a “name dropping” cast into the novel is therefore obvious and becomes a scholarly republic à la Arno Schmidt .
Meanwhile Utopia found in Antunes on concentric circles around transferred to the hospital: "It is possible that the walls of the hospital are concentric here and out there and all the land to the sea surround ... concentric walls ... labyrinths of houses and streets ... one that never really gets away. ”After lunch is over, he goes to a dentist's treatment, where a red-blond, slightly beastly girl gives him her number. The pain and the bright light of the boxing ring lamp at the dentist trigger a flood of memories. A hike through the city follows, during which he also sees his two daughters coming from high school. Later he goes to a bar, tries to contact the red-blonde, but she doesn't answer the phone, then he remembers wanting to attend an analysis session.
Once there, five women and three men talk about their suffering. When the doctor has his say, he utters what he had only thought in the other chapters: "I long for my wife, but I cannot tell her or anyone else besides them." Then he drives home in his car to the huge, furnitureless apartment. Now follows a final episode in a casino, where the psychiatrist meets an older woman named Dori, the "reptile". He spends the night with it and covers it up in the morning as if with a “compassionate shroud, while the teeth that have been loosened from the palate move to the rhythm of the breath”. The psychiatrist steps on the dark, cold balcony and feels free, resolves to put his life in order, to be less obscene and to buy a tapestry with tigers. He explains himself in the final sentence: "I need something that helps me to exist".
interpretation
The mental hospital serves as a metaphor for the whole country, located just out of the T-handle of Salazar - dictatorship has wound, the chaos of the crazies are offered a freedom that is difficult to use. Antune's doctor protagonist meets the sanctity of the medical profession with a cynical, biting joke, exposes them as incapable, bureaucratised and shows their amateurish instructions. It is therefore at the same time a questioning of the outdated psychiatric doctrines of the time and a weariness towards the institution as such, which corresponds to the trend of the late 1970s. Antunes adds his own appraisal of the failed marriage to this superficial narrative, which is used as a vehicle, which is a natural reason for writing for many authors, but which would be followed by dozens of other novels proves that it is a very great writer who is concerned with the The world has to rub in order not to go under. According to the publisher's information on the blurb, the title of the novel “Elefanten Gedächtnis” (Elephant Memory) goes back to descriptions by mother Antunes about her son.
expenditure
- Antonio Lobo Antunes: Memória de elefante . Publicações Dom Quixote, Lisbon 1979
- Antonio Lobo Antunes: Elephant Memory. Translated from the Portuguese by Maralde Meyer-Minnemann. Luchterhand, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-630-87177-1 (paperback edition with an afterword by Sigrid Löffler : btb, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-442-73424-5 )
Reviews
Friedhelm Rathjen from the Frankfurter Rundschau attested that the author had a captivating “linguistic force”, which, however, could not be properly expressed in the third person: “The sentences are long and expansive, many are stretched through participle constructions and create a kind of simultaneity prosa, like her apart from Antonio Lobo Antunes nobody writes. ”The external narrator hampers the expected internal monologue. “It is only on the last two pages of Elefanten Gedächtnis that he makes the leap into his actual work, everything before is a lazy compromise, an attempt to write in a way that is not (yet) his. His second, almost simultaneously incurred and a few months after elephants memory published novel The Judas Kiss is logically a single unfiltered inner monologue and the real clarion call of this incomparable author. "
Kersten Knipp was delighted with the successful new translation in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and already saw the work as a work of art, since it largely avoids “topoi and stereotypes”.
For the Süddeutsche Zeitung Knipps, Hans-Peter Kunisch agreed with the general assessment of the new translation of the novel from 1979 and praised the “art of language” of the writer, whose work seems to be linked “to the limits of sentimentality” with the will to be truthful.
Andrea Kachelrieß from the Stuttgarter Nachrichten was impressed by the work, the style of which is almost overwhelming, but also sometimes kitsch: “Breathless sentences pull the reader into their maelstrom like the vortex of a flood-bearing river. One metaphor chases the next; In the flood of images, however, one thing or the other gets crooked or a bit too cheesy. "
Hans-Jürgen Schmitt weighed the merits of the first novel in the cultural program of Deutschlandradio and compared it retrospectively to the complete works: “But something is very different from all later novels: he encounters the fear of dissolving into nothing with the refuge in literature , Music and art. Again and again there are pointed allusions to works by artists, musicians and writers embedded in the narrative, which help to explain his life situation. "
In novacultura it was found that the “restlessness and impulsiveness of the protagonist” is almost inevitably carried over to the reader and the insane asylum becomes a metaphor: “Elephant memory reads like a prototype of this huge, nested, and far from complete oeuvre with which Lobo Antunes writes the same hatred of the soul with every novel. "
literature
- Review note in the Frankfurter Rundschau from January 26, 2005
- Review note in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from January 20, 2005
- Review note in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of December 6, 2006
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Quoted from the review summary . On: perlentaucher.de . Accessed November 16, 2012.
- ↑ Full text of Rathjen's review: Ocher colors for an angry psychiatrist. The debut novel "Elefantengedächtnis" by the masterly António Lobo Antunes lacks the monological excess ( memento of the original from March 24, 2016 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. . On: www.lyrikwelt.de. Accessed November 16, 2012.
- ↑ Andrea Kachelrieß : “António Lobo Antunes: Elephant Memory - Dizzy with Love” ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten . November 17, 2004. Accessed November 16, 2012.
- ↑ Hans-Jürgen Schmitt : "Saudade" and red light. António Lobo Antunes: "Elephant Memory". On: Deutschlandradio . October 21, 2004. Accessed November 16, 2012.
- ↑ mk: Presentation and review of António Lobo Antunes: Elephant memory . On: novacultura. December 2004. Accessed November 16, 2012.
