Franny and Zooey

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Franny and Zooey ( Franny and Zooey ) is a 1961 book by JD Salinger . Salinger published the two stories Franny and Zooey , which were written in 1955 and 1957, respectively . Like almost all of Salinger's slender oeuvre, both deal with the fate of individual members of the New York Glass family. In the year of its publication, the book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list . The German translation of the book was done by Annemarie Böll and Heinrich Böll . In 2007 a new translation was published by Eike Schönfeld , who had previously translated Salinger's only novel The Catcher in the Rye (also initially translated by Böll's help) .

content

The first part, Franny , only fills a fifth of the book, is set in the vicinity of a college on the American east coast (according to John Updike, presumably Princeton ) and is about a freshman who feels more and more disappointed by the egocentricity and hypocrisy of her fellow students.
The second, longer part is named after Franny's five-year-old brother Zooey, a little linguistic genius with much more emotional clarity, who is said to have possessed the vocabulary of a humanities scholar at the age of twelve. He is asked by his mother Bessie to look after Franny and find out what her depressive little nervous breakdown is all about.

Franny
Lane Coutell picks up his girlfriend Franny at the train station to spend the weekend with her. He plans to go to a football match together and then go to a party. But first he invites Franny to a posh restaurant. While they wait for the different courses, he tells her about his academic successes and tries to impress her that his literary work on Flaubert is about to be published. Franny, however, reacts nervously, hardly eats anything, smokes too much and lacks the necessary enthusiasm. When confronted by Lane, she begins to question the entire college education and criticize Lane's college friends as superficial. Suddenly she becomes uncomfortable, there is a cold sweat on her forehead and she is afraid of passing out. She flees to the toilet, starts crying, but catches up and returns to Lane's table. The whole thing is puzzling and embarrassing to him at the same time, but above all sees his nice weekend plan falling into the water. Trying to feel sorry for her, he asks Franny about the little book she brought with her, called The Way of a Pilgrim . She enthusiastically explains to him that it is about a Russian wanderer who incessantly recites the Jesus prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner"), so intensely, naturally and endlessly, until he is just as unconscious how his breathing becomes and he, as if in a trance, believes to recognize God. When Lane dismisses the pilgrim's behavior as an interesting psychological phenomenon and the still completely fascinated Franny declares that he loves her, she feels sick again. She gets up, but collapses and doesn't wake up again until five minutes later in the manager's office. The story ends with Franny mumbling the Jesus poem while Lane, very concerned about his girlfriend's mysterious behavior, goes out into the street to hail a taxi and take Franny home.

Zooey
The sequel to the story of Franny's nervous breakdown takes place two days later. 25-year-old Zooey Glass sits in the bathtub, smokes and reads a four-year-old letter from his older brother and role model Buddy. His mother Bessie arrives, sits on the edge of the bathtub, begins to tell him in detail about her concerns about Franny's depression and doesn't let Zooey's repeated teasing and rude requests to finally disappear and let him take his bath take off dissuade her goal: she wants to convince him that Franny needs to see a psychiatrist. Zooey is strictly against it and wants to take matters into his own hands. When the little sister reacts extremely irritably and dismissively to his questions about the meaning of the Jesus prayer towards him, too, he resorted to a trick. He retreats to his older brother's room, picks up the phone and calls Franny. Since Buddy and Zooey's voices can hardly be distinguished on the phone, it is easy for him to pretend to be the older brother Buddy (who is very much admired by Franny) and to give her some advice. And even after Franny has seen through the game after a while, she doesn't hang up, but continues talking and opens up to him more and more. When Zooey finally tells her about Seymour, her eldest brother, who is loved like a saint by all the members of the Glass family (and not just since he committed suicide on his honeymoon a few years ago), and about his mysterious advice for bon vivants reports, Franny's tension is completely relieved and she can crawl contentedly into bed and fall asleep happily.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The encounter takes place at the time of the famous "Yale Games", an American football championship between Yale and Harvard .
  2. ↑ The Russian original by an unknown author is entitled Откровенные рассказы странника духовному своему отцу ( Sincere Tales of a Russian Pilgrim ). It is a significant script for the Russian tradition of hesychasm of the 19th century and the Imjaslavie (worship of the name of God) movement of the early 20th century.
  3. ↑ See. This A Wonderful Day for Banana Fish ( A Perfect Day for Banana Fish ), the first of Salinger's Nine Stories ( Nine Stories )