Exit ghost

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Exit Ghost is a novel by the American writer Philip Roth . Like many novels from Roth's late work, the plot revolves around the themes of old age, death and physical and mental decline. In the center of the novel Roth has - according to his own statement for the last time - put Nathan Zuckerman, his alter ego from earlier works. The meanwhile aged Zuckerman experiences the confrontation with various characters from his own past as well as with representatives of a young generation still in the middle of life.

The novel was first published in September 2007 by the American publisher Houghton Mifflin , the German translation by Dirk van Gunsteren in February 2008 by Carl Hanser Verlag . The inclusion of the novel was divided in both the American and German feature pages.

content

Ground Zero - Zuckerman returns to New York after September 11th.

For 11 years, Nathan Zuckerman has withdrawn from the world and lives in seclusion in the mountains of New England , where he avoids the media and the public. One reason for his withdrawal is a series of death threats that he received in the form of postcards with the portrait of Pope John Paul II on the front. Another reason is his age-related decline, physically in the form of both impotence and incontinence as a result of a prostate cancer operation, mentally in the form of increased memory interruptions, which make his work as a writer more and more difficult. At the age of 71, surgery on the prostate took him back to New York City . In the big city he first comes across the books of the writer EI Lonoff, who he admires but has since been forgotten by the public, and then his muse Amy Bellette, who is also once adored by Zuckerman and who has also aged and suffers from a brain tumor .

Zuckerman surprises himself with the sudden decision to respond to the ad in the New York Review of Books by the young writer couple Billy Davidoff and Jamie Logan . In response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the couple want to leave New York for a year and therefore advertise the exchange of their city apartment for a remote country house like that of Zuckerman. During a tour of the apartment, Zuckerman gets to know the couple better, and they watch the election night of the 2004 presidential election together . While the election victory of George W. Bush is a personal catastrophe for the liberal couple, Zuckerman is particularly fascinated by the erotic charisma of 30-year-old Jamie, who arouses desires in him that his body can no longer fulfill. So sublimated Zuckerman his passion in fictional texts between He and She , in which he imagines a relationship that will not arise between the real Zuckerman and the real Jamie.

Zuckerman sees himself in the field of tension between old people like him, who are everything "no longer", and those young people who are everything "not yet". The latter includes in particular Jamie's childhood friend Richard Kliman, who repels Zuckerman equally through his eagerness and intrusiveness as well as his youth and vitality. Kliman is planning a biography about EI Lonoff, which will be based primarily on the alleged unraveling of a youthful incest between Lonoff and his sister, who is three years older than him. Zuckerman feels challenged by the young man, sees him equally as a rival for Jamie and wants to protect the memory of Lonoff and Amy Bellette, who has been harassed by Kliman's research. But he soon notices that he overestimates his strength in a duel with the younger one.

After a final confrontation with Kliman, at the end of which Zuckerman remains behind with Lonoff's last manuscript, shrouded in mystery, without feeling the urge to read it, as well as a rejection of his advances by Jamie, Zuckerman realizes that he has no choice but to leave New York again and retreat to his secluded home. He invents one last dialogue between his fictional protagonists he and you , at the end of which there is no planned rendezvous between the two. While she is on the way to his hotel, he and his luggage dissolve in his hotel room and remain disappeared.

Form and language

Compared to his earlier works, according to the English literary critic James Wood , Roth's style has become simpler, harsher and more urgent in his later work. His language is characterized by a frugal, pragmatic style that focuses on his subject and apparently manages without literary effects. In fact, Roth's poetry flows into the text in a subtle and hardly noticeable way for the reader , using ordinary words in unusual contexts, for example through the mixture of two clichés in the characterization of Klimans, who is "armed to the teeth with time". Long and unbridled disputes are also typical of Roth's late style, which seem to have been spoken offhand, although their syntax has been worked out precisely, for example in Zuckerman's diatribe against modern cell phone communication.

In the structure of the novel, Roth intertwines several levels of reality. Not Roth himself is the narrator, but his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. The novel becomes an intertextual confrontation with Roth's earlier novel The Ghost Writer . Both novels, Zuckerman and Lonoff, revolve around two fictional writers and their fictional texts, with four extensive he / she scenes by Zuckerman being mounted in the plot of Exit Ghost . In their form they are reminiscent of the dialogue of a drama and reflect the real encounters between Zuckerman and Jamie, partly merging with them.

Background and interpretation

Zuckerman's return and departure

The character Nathan Zuckerman plays an important role in a total of ten books by Philip Roth, from The Ghost Writer to Exit Ghost . There are also two mentions in My Life as a Man and Deception . Zuckerman was often seen as Philip Roth's alter ego . Roth seemed to have said goodbye to the figure several times. In the novel Gegenleben , a funeral speech is already given in Zuckerman, and it is proclaimed under deception that he died suddenly. In the American trilogy of the nineties ( American Idyll , My Man, the Communist and The Human Blemish ) he only acted as a narrator, while he did not appear in the three publications after 2000, before he followed the plans of the in Exit Ghost Author's last appearance.

Already in the title Exit Ghost refers to Zuckerman's first big appearance in The Ghost Writer , and in terms of content, the novel draws back on Zuckerman's beginnings and reflects the constellation at that time. Now Zuckerman is the old, famous writer whom a young colleague chooses as a mentor. Richard Kliman slips into Zuckerman's role at the time. Zuckerman rejects the boy, but he has to admit that the boy reminds him of his own youth. And he even sees an eternal return of the same bustling and energetic type of person: "The Jews just can't stop producing such people." Like Lonoff in his relationship with Amy Bellette, Zuckerman is pursued by the desire for a younger muse, but he succeeds not to bind young Jamie to himself. While Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer still attributed the biography of an Anne Frank surviving the Third Reich to the then inaccessible Amy , he now learns her actual and completely non-eccentric experiences in the Holocaust , in which she lost parents and siblings. Volker Hage summarized: "In Exit Ghost , Roth sums up, corrects and complements his own fiction."

In the end, Zuckerman leaves. The last sentence of the novel is: “He's gone forever.” In an interview, Philip Roth relativized: “I didn't kill him. I just sent him home. ”However, his departure is final. In another conversation, Roth added that Zuckerman had helped him sort out his ideas and gave him a perspective. Now it has had its day.

Autobiographical and Biographical Matters

Ernest Hemingway , 1918. An essay-like insert turns against the unraveling of his early short stories.

Self-referentiality has always been of great importance in Philip Roth's work . In addition to Zuckerman, other characters served as the author's alter ego, including storytellers who bore the name Philip Roth. Volker Hage also summed up Zuckerman's final appearance: "Roth uses the allusive novel Exit Ghost once again as a platform for the ingenious game with autobiographical suggestion." Like his protagonist Zuckerman, Philip Roth has lived in Connecticut for most of his time since 1972 in later years to move his center of life to the Upper West Side . Unlike Zuckerman, he owned a cell phone, but rarely used it. Hage could hardly imagine a political abstinence similar to that of the Zuckermans with Roth, who polemicized for pages against Bush and his confidants in Exit Ghost . On the other hand, Zuckermans made the reader more difficult with amnesia, groping attempts at a last novel involuntarily reminded him of Roth himself. However, in an interview with Hermione Lee , Roth put into perspective , also with reference to Lonoff's fatal failure on his last novel, that he had never been as shattered by his work as his characters in the novel.

At the same time, Roth also used his protagonist Zuckerman to take a stand against an overly pronounced biography . When Kliman wanted to explain Lonoff's entire work through the incest, up to and including the unfinished novel about which Lonoff had died trying to come to terms with his youthful experience, Zuckerman put forward the counter-thesis that Lonoff had always veiled his own life and that in this novel only masks from other people's biographies put on, like that of Nathaniel Hawthorne . A letter from Amy Bellette to the New York Times , which was not dispatched, is particularly pointed against biographical reductionism in general and against the unraveling of the early Nick Adams stories of Ernest Hemingway in particular. The Australian literary critic Clive James saw the simultaneity of the autobiographical self-exposure of Roth and Zuckerman's insistence on looking at the work of an author without looking at his biography as a " Möbius strip tease" that never succeeded in resolving it. It remains hidden to what extent Zuckerman, who himself once reenacted Lonoff, really took on Amy Bellette's antibiographic theses, and to what extent she shared Roth as an author. James concluded that after the ghost finally wore off, the reader would be left wondering how real it was.

Literary influences and allusions

Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost of Théodore Chassériau - a scene from Macbeth that inspired the title of the novel.

For Philip Roth, the fact that Exit Ghost contains many literary allusions follows from the selection of his protagonists: they are writers, translators or at least serious readers, people who talked a lot about books.

The title of the novel Exit Ghost comes from William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth . He is a stage direction for the departure of Banquo's ghost. Roth read the drama before going to a theater performance. When the stage directions caught his eye, he immediately planned to use it as the title of his new book. The novel itself followed a basic idea from Rip van Winkle : the protagonist returns to the world after a long “sleep” and finds it changed. While working on Exit Ghost , Roth read Joseph Conrad's novel Die Schattenlinie , which prompted him to adopt individual phrases from Conrad and to transfer his own enthusiasm for reading the novel to Zuckerman. This does not succeed in winning Jamie over, but at least in his fictional stories the fictional You Conrad's novel is tasty. In addition to Amy Ballette's letter to the editor, another essay-like passage falls out of the actual plot of the novel: a multi-page tribute to the late sports writer George Plimpton, including a speaker appearance by Norman Mailer at his funeral.

reception

Exit Ghost reached the New York Times literary bestseller list as Philip Roth's third novel in a row , after the conspiracy against America and Everyone . The reviews in the American feature sections were respectful but mixed. Michael Dirda wrote in the Washington Post : “As a portrait of the artist as an old man, Exit Ghost provides pages of great, sad power. But as a work of art, the novel remains unfocused, never completely manages to tie the various threads together, but simply lets them go in the end. " Michiko Kakutani saw Exit Ghost in the New York Times as a modest undertaking compared to Roth's American trilogy The dying animal and everyone , however, contain deeply felt feelings. James Wood also compared Roth's last two novels and judged in the New Yorker that Exit Ghost was "a better novel than anyone , nested, artistic and oppressive". He avoids “sentimentality with the comedy that was missing in the previous novel. […] But the literary nesting gives this novel its deeply embedded complexity and makes it a delightful essay on the impulse of fictional writing. ”Clive James concluded in the New York Times Book Review :“ Exit Ghost . A great title. A great writer's book. A big book? Maybe it's just part of a puzzle. A big puzzle, and precisely for that reason true to life. "

The reactions to Exit Ghost were also divided in the German-language feature sections. For Gerrit Bartels in the Tagesspiegel , Roth took up his favorite topics of the last few years in Exit Ghost , so that he wished Roth “might put on another record”. Nevertheless, compared to Das dying Tier und Jedermann , the novel is “different, better. This novel refers to actually each strand in Roth's branchy novels, to-Zuckerman trilogy that many autobiographical shadow-boxing of the nineties in books such as deception or facts as well as the social novels of the American trilogy. "From Georg Diez 'view in the time , however, fell "The novel starts to lurch after just 50 pages". It will not be a “multi-layered study” on the origin of literature, but merely a “satirical commentary on Zuckerman's complaints”. In the end, Roth slipped "this strangely unfinished novel". In the opinion of Sebastian Moll in the Frankfurter Rundschau , Exit Ghost “did not live up to the standard that one can expect from Philip Roth.” And he concluded: “If Roth's self-reflection only produces such fragile prose, then there is grief about Zuckerman. ”On the other hand, Julia Encke wished in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that Zuckerman could come back after this“ invitation to the last dance [...] and stay forever ”. The novel is "a struggle against the realm of conjecture and speculation, against 'biographical reductionism' and the 'tabloid chatter' of cultural journalism." Andrea Köhler rated Exit Ghost in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung as "such a nuanced and polyphonic novel" , which "may have become the first really poetic book by this master of prose", but in any case a "beautiful, narrow novel".

literature

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Volker Hage: A deputy disappears . In: Volker Hage: Philip Roth. Books and Encounters , Hanser, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-446-23016-3 , pp. 141–149.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See section: James Wood: Parade's End . In: The New Yorker, October 15, 2007.
  2. ↑ Volker Hage: A deputy disappears , p. 146. Whole section, p. 141–147.
  3. ↑ "I haven't killed him. I just sent him home. "Quoted from: Klaus Brinkbäumer, Volker Hage: " Bush Is Too Horrendous to Be Forgotten " . Interview with Philip Roth. In: Spiegel Online from August 2, 2008.
  4. ↑ Michael Naumann: The time of the new seriousness . Interview with Philip Roth. In: The time of February 2, 2009.
  5. ↑ a b Volker Hage: A deputy disappears , p. 148.
  6. ↑ a b Klaus Brinkbäumer, Volker Hage: "Bush Is Too Horrendous to Be Forgotten" . Interview with Philip Roth. In: Spiegel Online from August 2, 2008.
  7. ↑ a b c Hermione Lee: Age Makes a Difference . Interview with Philip Roth. In: The New Yorker October 1, 2007.
  8. ↑ Clive James: Falter Ego . In: The New York Times, October 7, 2007.
  9. ^ Dwight Garner: Inside the List . In: The New York Times, October 21, 2007.
  10. ^ "As a portrait of the artist as an old man, 'Exit Ghost' delivers pages of great, sad power. But as a work of art it feels unfocused, never quite drawing together its various threads but, in the end, simply relinquishing them. "Quoted from: Michael Dirda: Nathan Zuckerman, now 71, faces mortality - and sex - one last time . In: The Washington Post, September 30, 2007.
  11. ↑ Michiko Kakutani: Seeking a Moral at the End of the Tale In: The New York Times, October 2, 2007.
  12. ^ “His new novel is a better novel than Everyman , intricate, artful, and pressing, and avoids sentimentality with the comedy that the latter novel lacked. […] But the literary intricacy of this novel is what gives it its deep-shelved complexity and makes it a lovely essay on the fiction-writing impulse. ”Quoted from: James Wood: Parade's End . In: The New Yorker, October 15, 2007.
  13. ↑ " Exit Ghost. Great title. The book of a great writer. A great book? Maybe it's just another piece of a puzzle. A great puzzle, and true to life in being so. ”Quoted from: Clive James: Falter Ego . In: The New York Times, October 7, 2007.
  14. ↑ Exit Ghost on Pearl Divers .
  15. ↑ Gerrit Bartels: Everything on Zuckerman . In: Der Tagesspiegel from February 9, 2008.
  16. ↑ Georg Diez: Zuckerman's complaints . In: The time of February 9, 2008.
  17. ^ Sebastian Moll: Exit Zuckerman . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of October 8, 2007.
  18. ↑ Julia Encke: One last time . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung from February 10, 2008.
  19. ↑ Andrea Köhler: The death of others . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from February 5, 2008.