Happy dying
Happy death is a novel by Volker Harry Altwasser from 2014, which uses a fragment of a novel by Bruno Frank from 1945.
Action skeleton
The dying writer Bruno Frank waited in the summer of 1945 in the Villa Aurora for his longtime friend Thomas Mann . Meanwhile, he dictates one last novel to his wife Elisabeth - the 1794 story of the dying writer Nicolas Chamfort : His attempt to evade arrest by the Jacobin henchmen with a suicide fails. In the course of a revenge plan by Freiherr von der Trenck , Denise, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the guard, is leaked to him as a clerk. The badly mutilated Chamfort dictates his life story to her on his deathbed; with her he experiences his last erotic moments: “The novel about dying becomes a novel about love, about revolution, and then, and that is the biggest, breathtaking break in“ happy dying ”, the dying, one-eyed Chamfort is transformed into a Marquis de Sade . "
Emergence
In exile in California, shortly before his death, Bruno Frank began working on Chamfort Telling His Death . The novel about the last days of the French writer Chamfort remained a fragment. An excerpt appeared in a special edition of the Neue Rundschau in June 1945 . Altwasser continued the story it began. In doing so, he wove Chamfort telling his death as well as other excerpts and quotations (including from Frank's Trenck. Novel of a Favorite ) into his own text. Altwasser marked the short foreign passages with an initial word in bold.
In addition, he told the fictional genesis of the novel fragment and expanded it to include reflections on writing and failure. While working on Happy Dying , Altwasser resided in the Villa Aurora on a scholarship in 2013.
Stylistic devices and motifs
The levels of the novel are graduated in a mise en abyme : “A writer writes about a writer who writes about a writer. Volker Harry Altwasser on Bruno Frank and this on Nicolas Chamfort ”. He illuminates the writing process itself on all three levels: “It interprets and illustrates internal connections in Frank's work. He plays with reality and the effects of literature. And he also lets the reader take part in the creation process of novels, writes how Bruno Frank works his material ”. Other means used include: a. the collage , the pastiche and the historiographical metafiction . Central motifs are those of master and servant ("Because that was the power of the servants that they let rule", Happy Dying , p. 4) and that of the failing artist, which is however turned in a positive way here.
reception
Reviews refer to the courage to experiment and the precision of the craft. Altwasser "formulates carefully and artfully interwoven, is meticulous". The novel “is artfully constructed”, with the narrative trick of capturing the fantasies of the character Bruno Frank through the perspective of his wife: “Maybe Altwasser is right, why shouldn't the dying once again look at the most beautiful and hottest pictures of their lives. The fact that as a reader, however, one has the greatest understanding of Ms. Frank's disgust for old-man fantasies is again an extremely skilful move by the author Altwasser. " Happy dying is a" sometimes cryptic, sometimes very lightly told novel that connects centuries " , which sometimes remains cold in thought: "It's all well considered and coolly calculated - but it is only rudimentary, captivating, touching."
Trivia
Altwasser described the novel as a “Franco-German› Nouvelle Noire ‹” and dedicated it to the Swiss writer Thomas Hürlimann .
literature
- Volker Altwasser: Happy death. Volker Harry Altwasser's novel about Bruno Frank's report, in which Chamfort tells of his death. Matthes & Seitz Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-88221-197-9 .
- Bruno Frank: Chamfort tells his death , in: Neue Rundschau, special edition for Thomas Mann's 70th birthday, June 6, 1945, pp. 121–127.
- Hans Jochim Schädlich reads Bruno Frank: Chamfort tells his death. Fragments of a novel. Audiobook Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3934120334 .
- Bruno Frank: Trenck. Novel of a favorite. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-351-01390-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b [1] , Clemens Meyer , Yes, to hell, how is that possible! in: Die Welt, March 22, 2014 (accessed May 28, 2014).
- ^ [2] Villa Aurora scholarship holders 2013 (accessed May 28, 2014).
- ↑ a b c [3] Simone Trieder, Stubborn dying - happily composed , in: Fixpoetry, May 4, 2014 (accessed: May 28, 2014).
- ↑ a b Volker Harry Altwasser: Happy dying ( Memento from May 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Stefan Berkholz in: wdr3, April 22, 2014
Web links
Further reviews on Perlentaucher and mephisto 97.6 (accessed: 23 August 2014).