Freaks (novel)
Freaks is a 2003 novel by the American writer Joey Goebel .
It is written from changing perspectives; the mostly very short chapters are told from the perspective of one of the characters.
expenditure
The original edition was published in 2003 by MacAdam / Cage Publishing in San Francisco under the title The Anomalies . The book was published in German in 2006 by Diogenes Verlag . The translation was done by Hans M. Herzog . A German audio book version appeared in the same year. It has been read by Cosma Shiva Hagen , Jan Josef Liefers , Charlotte Roche , Cordula Trantow and Feridun Zaimoglu , among others .
content
A band is formed in a typical small town in the US state of Kentucky . The reader gets to know the members in the opening scene of the novel: The five members have arranged to meet in a Red Lobster chain restaurant and are gradually arriving .
First up, Opal Oglesby, an 80-year-old babysitter , and her protégé, eight -year-old elusive Ember Blackwell appear. Ember, outwardly extremely handsome and cute, is neglected by her parents and projects her hatred onto her entire environment. In school in particular, she attracts attention negatively, although her teacher, unlike her parents, at least recognizes that the girl is highly intelligent.
Opal spent her working life in a wheel and hubcap workshop. She never got married. Well, in old age, she wants to live out all of her needs. She regularly drives the head of the therapy group in the old people's home to despair with her provocative remarks.
After Ember and Opal, Aurora Buchanan and Luster Johnson arrive. Luster is the head of the group who also writes the lyrics for the band. He is an African American and grew up the middle of thirteen brothers, all named Jerome, who deal in drugs. Luster, who makes his living as an employee on a dog track, is an exception in every respect. He is as well-read as he is sensitive, and although his supervisor excuses his eccentric behavior on the pretext that he is drugged, he does not use any of the substances, with whom his typical milieu brothers earn a living. The beautiful aurora has a completely different social background. She is the daughter of a preacher, but has devoted herself to Satanism and initially worked in a strip show, where Opal and Luster met her. She is now in a wheelchair and works as a bread baker in a fast food restaurant.
The fifth band member is Ray Fuquay. He is from Iraq and moved to the United States in search of a specific soldier. This man, who according to a sticker on his helmet must have come from Kentucky, was injured by Ray in hand-to-hand combat in Qasr al-Khubbaz . For this he would now like to ask his forgiveness. Ray - actually Raykeem - is the only band member who has a reasonably intact family life: He brought his wife Milkah and son Aymon with him to the USA. In his home country he worked in a sandal factory, in the USA he drives a taxi and works in a tanning salon. He met Ember in a martial arts course and thus made contact with the other members of the band.
Even at the meeting in the restaurant, it becomes clear how the five band members stand out from the representatives of the white middle class who dominate the place. After a young man at the next table has provocatively commented on the unusual appearance and behavior of the five protagonists, he is sidelined by Luster through a relentless analysis of his superficial and average existence.
While Luster, who has the habit of expressing all his thoughts out loud, knows how to defend himself in such situations, he cannot solve another problem: the band only rehearsed five times in five months because they lack the appropriate rooms. This means that an appearance is out of the question for the time being. During one of the attempts to rehearse in Luster's living room, the five are interrupted by Luster's brothers. While the Jeromes are distracted by their interest in the beautiful Aurora, Ember steals a bag of crack unnoticed from them .
After a rehearsal was canceled, Aurora decides to reconcile with her father in order to use her spacious home as a rehearsal room. Immediately, Luster, accompanied by Ember, pays the Reverend a visit. Meanwhile, Aurora attends a party run by her employer, David Silver. He asks her to have her picture taken for the erotic calendar of his restaurant, Ken's Fried Chicken. When she refuses and he threatens her with dismissal and points out that, as a disabled person, she can be grateful to him for having been hired at all, she gets out of her wheelchair and leaves the party on foot. Luster, who she meets at home a little later, explains to her astonished father why Aurora faked paralysis: In this way, she tried to stop being viewed exclusively as a sex object. Reverend Buchanan is thoroughly impressed by Luster and his speaking skills, but negotiations about a rehearsal room fail because Ember, full of destructiveness, falls an expensive Jesus figure from Buchanan's collection from its pedestal in an unobserved moment.
The situation is escalating at school too. After the teacher summoned them for an interview, Ember's parents went to Cancun for a month to relax . Ember leave them in Opal's care. As soon as they have left their luxurious home, the band settles in there to rehearse and - also to spend the night. Because Luster is only too happy to use the opportunity to temporarily separate from his brothers, Aurora has problems at home because of the destroyed fictional character and Ray's family has returned to Iraq after a conflict about the different worlds.
In the next few weeks there will not only be intensive rehearsals, but an idyllic flat share will also develop . Aurora and Opal stay home, Ember goes to school, and the men work. On one of his days off in the tanning salon, Ray accompanies Luster to the dog racing track. There it turns out that Luster's boss, a typical representative of white trash , is the man Ray is looking for and wants to ask for forgiveness. The surprise hits him on the stomach and he first vomits, but then he delivers the speech he has been preparing for years. Joe is taken by surprise and says the hip shot is taken.
The idyll in the Blackwell family's home is disturbed by a phone call from Buchanan. David Silver's erotic calendar fell into the hands of this. Although Aurora had refused to be photographed for it, she now appears in the picture for December. Silver used a snapshot from the party and redesigned it accordingly. Although Aurora can calm her furious father by informing her that she is still a virgin, she wants to take the calendar out of circulation. She succeeds in doing this with the help of Lusters and Embers. While she, accompanied by Ember, who mimes a fit of madness at the right moment, distracts her former employer, Luster buys the entire supply of calendars and pays the employee, who is drugged and doesn't notice anything, with coupons for dog betting. After this action, the three band members go to the owner of the only rock club in town and persuade him to let the band play next weekend.
Since they advertised the concert with all possible means, the audience in the Pandemonium on the evening of the performance is more numerous and diverse than ever. From the hippie to the Johnson brothers to David Silver, from Opal's homosexual therapist to Ember's teacher to Joe, the Gulf War veteran with the bullet in his hip, everyone the band members have ever come into contact with is there. After Luster's appeal to the audience to finally take off his designer skin, the concert begins. The audience is thrilled, but already with the second song there is an incident: Joe, who has not forgiven Ray after all, draws a gun and shoots Ray in the genitals through the keyboard. Two of the Johnson brothers reflexively grab their guns and shoot Joe. A mass panic ensues, the police intervene and, to top it all, find the crack stolen by Ember in Opal's bass amplifier. The offended David gave her the tip. Of course, the cops don't believe that Ember stole the drugs or that Opal took them to experiment with, but instead sell Luster, who fits into the drug dealer's scheme.
In six epilogues you can find out what happened afterwards: Ray, now called “husband”, has recovered and is back at home. However, he misses life in the USA and the contact with the band. The correspondence was stopped by his wife Milkah. Opal, now “grandmother”, married the 29-year-old geriatric nurse Chuck, the “child” Ember was sent to an educational institution and the “sister” Aurora, as frigid as she is beautiful, has decided to live as a nun. The "convict" Luster feels it is an honor to pay for the mistakes of others and has found his peace in front of humanity in prison. Finally, the “author” also speaks up and appeals again that the individual, disgusted by the crowd but filled with philanthropy, may be allowed to act out his otherness and to think his “nonsensical thoughts”.
reception
Goebel's work was received differently by the critics. Sven Nees, who reviewed the audiobook version in 2007, said: "The plot may be confused and not always logical, but it doesn't have to be, after all, we're dealing with freaks." He compared the novel with a model for Pulp Fiction Light - light only because there is less blood at Goebel than at Quentin Tarantino . Wilhelm Ruprecht Frieling also seemed a bit at a loss in his 2006 review. He noted in a distanced manner: “Joey Goebel is regarded as a promising author of pop modernism, whose subject is the insipid mediocrity of small-town life. Because of the theming of »being different« he is often mentioned in the same breath as John Irving and TC Boyle ", pointed out the success of Goebel's earlier novel Vincent and then asked:" Whether he stays with »Freaks« creeps the hearts of readers? ”Kai Wiegandt was also rather skeptical in his review in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of December 27, 2006, but praised the lack of a happy ending . An extensive evaluation learned the novel in Evelyn Fingers article "God coolster pen pal" in the period from 28 September 2006. Freaks was, she writes, not really a novel, but "a fit of rage, a brash as Popgroteske camouflaged, with plenty verlottertem Party vocabulary garnished culture-critical manifesto . ”With this book, Goebel criticizes“ the betrayal of the possibilities of human existence, that is, true blasphemy, which inevitably results from stupidity ”. Probably, according to Finger, "no other literary text has appeared since the Enlightenment that proclaims freedom as the highest purpose of creation and moral perfection as a categorical imperative with such missionary seriousness ." Finger, who also points to the virtuosity with which the book is written , and points to its comedy, describes works by established stars of American realism such as Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen as well as those of the postmodernists Donald Barthelme or Paul Auster as - compared to freaks - "badly shocked". Goebel is a "sharp thinker" and a "purposeful cynic", but also a great humorist. As an example, Finger cites God's e-mail to Opal, in which he apologizes for work overload shortly before the concert and talks about his “coolest creations” Russell Crowe and Wesley Snipes in a postscript.
Text output
- Joey Goebel, Freaks , Diogenes Taschenbuch, ISBN 978-3-257-23662-0 , 2007
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.hr-online.de/website/rubriken/kultur/index.jsp?rubrik=42958&key=standard_rezension_36016800 ( 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.
- ↑ https://www.literaturzeitschrift.de/book-review/review134/
- ↑ http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/25185.html
- ↑ Evelyn Finger: Novel: God's coolest pen pal . In: The time . No. 40/2006 ( online ).
