Memories of a marriage

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Memories of a Marriage (English original title: Memories of a Marriage ) is a novel by the American writer Louis Begley . It was published in 2013 by the New York publisher Nan A. Talese. In the same year the Suhrkamp Verlag published the German translation by Christa Krüger. A quarter of a century after she was divorced, the first-person narrator of the novel tries to put together the image of a marriage from the various memories of contemporary witnesses and to clarify the question of why it failed.

content

Philip is a happy person. He is a successful writer, lives alternately in Paris , New York and Sharon , Connecticut and loves his wife Bella as well as their daughter Agnes. Then fate strikes and lets Agnes die from an accident and Bella from incurable leukemia in quick succession. Philip is left alone and, besides fear of old age, only has his work and memories. At a theater performance he suddenly meets Lucy De Bourgh Snow, whom he met half a century ago in Paris and with whom he had a brief affair - like various other men.

Lucy comes from one of the leading families of the American early days. Although the wealth of her ancestors has largely been consumed over the generations, she is still financially secure enough that she never had to work for a living and was able to quickly give up short-term work attempts, such as an internship at Paris Vogue . Her mixture of beauty, social status and erotic uninhibitedness exerted an irresistible attraction not only to the young Philip. She also turned the head of business student Thomas Snow. This came from a completely different milieu than Lucy. His father was an auto mechanic, but the ambitious son was already planning a career on Wall Street . The two unequal partners married, had a son and divorced 14 years after his birth. It was only during his second marriage to a journalist named Jane that Thomas developed into the influential and respected investment banker, whose death five years ago received numerous obituaries.

Philip is surprised at the contempt and bitterness with which Lucy still talks 25 years after her divorce from the man he only got to know as a friendly young student. She complains about Thomas' lack of manners and that he only took advantage of her and her social position. At no point in her life she could have liked him at all and only married to escape her personal problems, a family that cut her, a turbulent love affair with the Swiss journalist Hubert Brillard that consumed her, and intensive psychological treatment up to inpatient stays in a psychiatric clinic. With their son, Thomas, who could never satisfy her in bed, only wanted to chain his wife to himself. He himself had an affair with Jane, which Lucy finally refused to accept and demanded a divorce.

The catastrophic picture that Lucy draws of their outwardly so inconspicuous marriage also begins to interest Philip as a writer, and he makes contact with mutual acquaintances who portray the deceased very differently. Thomas' second wife, Jane, asserts that there was no intimacy between them prior to the divorce. Philips cousin Josiah Weld, who works at Morgan Stanley , praises Thomas highly, not only as an excellent investment banker, but also as a person of integrity. Alex van Buren, a former fellow student, confesses that he once paired up Thomas and Lucy in order to comfortably steal himself out of an affair with the difficult woman. It wasn't an affair of his friend that ended the marriage, but Lucy's never-settled relationship with Hubert, which was exposed when Alex caught them both in a London hotel. In spite of everything, his friend assured that he would marry Lucy again because he had never stopped loving her.

Philips' fellow writer Bill sees Lucy in a more nuanced light, possibly because of his homosexuality, which excluded erotic tensions in their friendship. Lucy reminds him of Madame Bovary . Thomas Snow was a cool and easily transparent person, an American dream of social advancement that had come alive and was unable to bring any romance into his wife's life. Finally, Jamie, the son of the Snows, answers and paints the picture of a hopelessly broken marriage from which a child should never have emerged. Although he has only made it to a second-rate screenwriter professionally, he has found happiness with a Chicana that does not correspond at all to the classroom conceit of his parents. For Philip, what remains in the end is a mosaic of different memories of a marriage. But he makes his decision when the still charming Lucy proposes a future together to the widowed, and regretfully shakes his head.

interpretation

After his debut Lies in Times of War , Begley wrote mostly social novels about the life of the wealthy upper class on the American east coast . It is the class of the WASP , the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” or, as Hannes Stein puts it, “the Protestant money nobility on the American east coast” that Begley is familiar with from studying at Harvard University and working as a successful lawyer. Even memories of a marriage is a "panorama of the American upper class" around the dinner invitations and elitist club with cocktail parties alternate, luxury hotels in Europe with trendy restaurants, including Wolfgang Schneider formulated "musical and culinary surveying a world of the wealthy and the Snobs ". According to Tilman Urbach , Begley shows "an Anglican upper class who consider themselves to be a real aristocracy and who treat upstart of all kinds with cold arrogance." Despite small tips that he skillfully distributes, according to Shirin Sojitrawalla, Begley does not expose the American elite, rather he investigates she “with an almost ethnographic curiosity”. Daniela Strigl describes him in this regard as the " vivisector of American high society".

Meike Feßmann names love, sex, ambition, deception, retribution, forgiveness, fear of old age and death as themes in the novel - the only themes that, according to a conversation between Philip and Bella, are worthwhile. The journey into a “memory labyrinth” is narrated by a double narrator's voice: the warm melancholy of Philips and the shrill, vicious counter-voice of Lucy, which gives the novel its wit. According to Begley's own information, he designed Philips' happy marriage as "the yardstick by which he measures Lucy's marriage." Nevertheless, Shirin Sojitrawalla considers Lucy to be the actual protagonist of the novel, her marriage as its pulsating center. For Wolfgang Schneider, Philip remains pale, and he judges: “Without Lucy with her bluntness and aversions, this novel would be boring.” Due to the indirect form of the narrative, the marriage story loses urgency for him, the novel gains “something exemplary. What reliable things can be said about two people living together? "

According to Wolfgang Schneider, the novel develops contrary to the readers' expectations: No fall of a powerful person is staged, but his careful reconstruction after the initial accusations. According to Shirin Sojitrawalla, the novelist Philip acts like a detective in a criminal case and Begley himself like the trained lawyer he is: he calls prosecutors and witnesses, gathers clues and makes readers confidante of a story that she's always exactly the same know as much as the narrator himself. Why the two spouses got married in the first place is the central question that Philip investigates, and he gives the answer at one point: “You have to live with someone to realize that you can't stand them . ”Thomas, on the other hand, with his confession that he would marry Lucy again in a second life, reminds of Kürmann from Max Frisch's biography: a game that has to live his life in the same way over and over again and remains committed to an identity that he owns can't escape.

In the end, however, it's not just about reconstructing a marriage, it's also about a writer's question of how to tell a story. Begley's answer to this is multiperspectivity . According to Shirin Sojitrawalla, it is possible “to show the inside and outside of a marriage, to reconcile Lucy's self-image with the perceptions of others”. In the novel, Begley's colleague Meg Wolitzer finds an insight into the writer's writing process, such as “ Impressions, interviews, instincts, prejudices and feelings “come together in the end to create a story. According to Begley's second wife Anka Muhlstein , her husband's novel is “about the winding paths that life can take. And how you explain your own life to yourself. In a way it is a Proustian view of life. "

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 .
  2. ↑ Meg Wolitzer : 'Our Kind of People' . In: The New York Times, August 2, 2013.
  3. ↑ a b Hannes Stein : Sex and other mental obstacles . In: Die Welt from October 6, 2013.
  4. ^ A b c Wolfgang Schneider: Best location, wrong side . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 27, 2013.
  5. ^ Tilman Urbach: Nothing but surface . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from January 23, 2014.
  6. ↑ a b c d Shirin Sojitrawalla: A broken marriage as part of identity . In: Deutschlandfunk from September 22, 2013.
  7. ↑ Daniela Strigl : climber and arrogant devil woman . In: The Standard of October 18, 2013.
  8. ↑ Meike Feßmann: Until sex do us part . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of October 8, 2013.
  9. ↑ "impressions, interviews, instincts, prejudices and feelings". Quoted from: Meg Wolitzer: 'Our Kind of People' . In: The New York Times, August 2, 2013.
  10. ^ Moritz von Uslar : A happy marriage . In: Die Zeit from October 2, 2013.