Free radicals (short story)
Free Radicals (in the original Free Radicals , 2008/2009) is a short story by Alice Munro that uses a practical example to show how useful knowledge about the potential power of fiction can be.
action
The story is about two adults who briefly get to know each other. In the conversation, which is becoming increasingly conflictual, both bring certain parts of their life stories, which, among other things, deal with loss of trust and fear and which at the moment of being told could appear to be invented from the point of view of the other person. One side shows photos as evidence , the other uses the story alone. A longer opening credits, in which Nita’s initial situation and reading habits are described, contrasts with a very short ending in which Nita is visited again involuntarily, this time by a police officer. In the course of the middle section, which is the longest section at 15 pages, the climate and the pace of the story changes considerably, and it consists mainly of dialogue . The title of the story appears once in the wording because it is suddenly pronounced as a word Nita is looking for in relation to red wine , but this only seems to be of marginal importance .
Interpretations
In this story, the recipe is tried out to keep a violent man at bay by inventing one's own murder, says Irmtraud Gutschke in her review of the volume in Neues Deutschland . "Free radicals" is a psychological masterpiece because it counters his boasting of the murder of his parents and sister with the confession of her own outrages and in this way makes herself an accomplice , Gisela Ostwald reviews the work for the star . Sylvia Staude thinks that the uninvited visitor will not take her life, but only the car, because she had suggested to him by confessing her murder that he now had her in his hand. The fact that the deed, like the story, is fiction means a double triumph for literature . In this way, the cancer patient is able to successfully fight “for this part of life that can only be measured in months”. Cliff Garstang reports that while reading "Free Radicals" he associates stories of O'Connor and that you fall in love with Nita's fear and pain - and he asks what Nita actually did. Nita involved the man in conversations that lead to the fact that she could dissuade him from his threatening plans towards her. Much of what moves you when you read remains unspoken. The fact that your own imagination gets so busy can make you addicted to Munro's works, says Katrin Bettina Müller in the taz using this story as an example. The reality get a crack, writes Jana Simon for the time , to carve than the man with a shard and be seen blood in this " intimate play of the inner world", a story that 25 pages is short and long as a novel . In truth, she herself was the lover whose murder she confessed to with her “ lie in need”.
Editions and versions
The first version of the story was published in the February 11, 2008 issue of The New Yorker and is free to read on the web. The second version is included in the Too Much Happiness collection (2009), the thirteenth volume of Munro's short stories. The work has a length of approx. 20 pages in English. The German translation of the story by Heidi Zerning was published by S. Fischer in Frankfurt am Main in 2011, and the volume is entitled Too much luck .
The four sections in the first version become three in the book version by removing a section break. The prehistory comes to stand in the first section, the second section begins with Nita wanting to ventilate because it seems to be a hot day. The third section begins with the second visitor knocking. There are mainly syntactic changes, for example from “She would have to invade her dead husband's mind” to “... her husband's dead mind”, as well as stylistic shortages and tense changes and that in some places direct speech becomes free, direct speech. In addition, there are some changes from the first version to the second of the following type (the new version is named in order of appearance, italicized the new version): “She was really a rather serious, physically awkward, self-conscious woman - hardly a girl - who could recite all the queens, not just the kings but the queens , of England ... "or" He was ... ready to peer jokingly in the window - through which she might, in earlier days, have pretended to be alarmed at the sight of a peeping tom / pretended to be starting a striptease . "At the end there are two more noteworthy changes:" She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But real life had become / But this was too important to argue about. ”And, immediately afterwards, the first version is marked in italics:“ And now, most strangely, all that was gone. Not just with Rich's death but with her own immersion in illness. Then she had thought that the change was temporary and the magic of reading would reappear once she was off certain drugs ... ". In the second section there are u. a. the following changes: "as if he were asthmatic / might suffer chest wheezing ", "So then you say, Why get rid of her? He might still have been thinking of staying with me? / Been thinking both ways ? ”And,“ So what are you going to say about the car? ” he said. "You sold it to a stranger. Right?" The import of this did not come to her for a moment. When it did, the room quivered. Going to say . "Thank you," she said, ... “The echo was deleted for the second version. In the last section: “She looked at the patch of gravel where it had been parked. "It's gone," she said. "It was over there / That's where it was ."
Individual evidence
- ↑ Irmtraud Gutschke, literature. The unfathomable. Alice Munro: »Too much luck« , neue-deutschland.de , November 10, 2011
- ↑ Gisela Ostwald, "Too much luck". Alice Munro writes life-wise short stories , stern.de , May 20, 2011
- ↑ Sylvia Staude, Alice Munro's Masterful New Stories. The double triumph of storytelling , fr-online.de , May 31, 2011
- ↑ Cliff Garstang, The New Yorker: "Free Radicals" by Alice Munro , perpetualfolly.blogspot.de , February 13, 2008, see also the comments, in which some details of Munro's craft are discussed.
- ↑ See also the other summary of the story. Katrin Bettina Müller, Nobel Prize for Literature for Alice Munro. One who learned to wait early. The writer was often denied the direct route. Now, at the age of 82, Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Rightly. , taz.de , October 10, 2013
- ^ Jana Simon, Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro. A crack in reality , zeit.de , December 5, 2013
- ↑ Alice Munro, Free Radicals , newyorker.com , February 11, 2008