Homer & Langley

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Homer & Langley is a novel by the American writer Edgar Lawrence Doctorow , published in 2009 . The German translation of the same name by Gertraude Krueger was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 2011 . On the basis of the true events around the Collyer brothers , Doctorow creates a poetically free, idiosyncratic view of the twentieth century.

Real role models

The novel is based on the story of the Collyer brothers, whose names Homer and Langley Collyer the author keeps as well as many external details of what actually happened. These include the three-story Collyers house on Upper Fifth Avenue (which he is moving a little south to the immediate vicinity of Central Park ), its increasing decay, its barricading and Langley's unbelievable, morbid collecting mania.

In the novel, Langley initially systematically collects all available newspapers. Later, almost every new item that Langley brings into the house leads to the fact that he randomly piles up a whole collection of similar items: pianos, typewriters, tapes, weapons, televisions - to name just a few of the items that literally end up the whole house to complete. The biographical details that Doctorow realistically adopts include Langley Collier's quirky inventiveness and his piano playing, which Doctorow transfers to Homer.

A second real basis of the novel are historical events of the twentieth century, in which the brothers are entangled in a sometimes absurd way. The resulting idiosyncratic view of the century is one of the main contents of the novel. Events range from before World War I to the hippie and anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1970s (the real Collyer brothers died in 1947). The Spanish flu , for example, plays a more detailed role in the novel (from which Doctorow lets the brothers' parents die earlier than in reality and thus creates the hermetic narrative situation of the whole novel from the start), the silent film , the acquaintance with a gangster in the prohibition era , the Great Depression , World War II , the advent of television and, most recently, the race riots in the United States.

construction

The novel lines up fictional notes by Homer Collyer in chronological order. The longest contiguous episodes are only a few pages long. Most of the episodes are written as remembered recollections of Homer, only the last as current records, as Homer begins writing at Langley's suggestion towards the end of the novel to pass the time when he can no longer play the piano in the house because of the clutter. More significant than this practical motivation, however, is the chance encounter with the writer Jacqueline Roux, his last enthusiastic old love, whom he mentions several times as his muse, so that the novel can also be understood as a life story for her. The regularly flowing historical events allow a chronological classification of the episodes.

Other content

The biography and the detailed descriptions of the cohabitation of the brothers are largely a poetic creation of Doctorow. He lets Homer go blind right at the beginning of the novel "long before the First World War" when he was not yet twenty years old (the real Homer Collyer went blind in 1933 at the age of fifty-two). The constant blindness of Homer, who is portrayed as an intelligent and sensitive observer (of course in the figurative sense of the word), allows Doctorow a distanced view of the events portrayed. Some of the episodes show Homer's inner perspective on his own life.

Due to his handicap, Homer is often in the role of a passive observer. The brothers only took part in public life for the first few decades, but except for walks and a temporary job as a pianist in a cinema during the silent film era, Homer relies on his brother to accompany him. Women only play a part in his life at times. After a purely sexual affair with a maid, Homer shares a platonic love with a piano student who prompts him to see the film going on in the cinema. Towards the end of the novel she is murdered as a nun in Central America. At the same time, Homer went deaf and the last woman he met - the last person he had any contact with besides his brother - was Jacqueline Roux.

In the episodes with descriptions of the intimate coexistence with Langley, Homer's uninvolved objectivity is mixed with a critical distance to Langley's undertakings, which Homer seldom expresses openly, but mostly closes off in his thoughts and notes. The reader only learns about Langley what Homer directly witnessed or what he suspects about his thoughts and actions.

Before the First World War, Langley was the only one who paid close attention to Homer and, for example, read books to him after he went blind. His obsession with collecting begins with the fact that he buys and keeps all available newspapers and combines this with the fixed “replacement theory” that “everything in life is replaced”, although there are minor changes over time, nothing fundamentally changes. Homer's reaction to this fluctuates between an exceptionally open contradiction and an attempt to understand the causes of Langley's behavior. Langley comes back from the war war- damaged and mentally changed. The replacement theory now grows to the idea that it is possible to distill an "eternal newspaper" from daily events, which contains everything worth mentioning and suffices forever. Most of Langley's later endeavors are of a similarly obsessive and eccentric nature.

When one of these undertakings, the organization of semi-public tea dances in the brothers' house during the world economic crisis, angered the neighbors and was stopped by the police, the brothers increasingly restricted their contacts with the public. This makes them all the more suspicious of their neighbors and leads to attacks and broken window panes. When Langley rebels more and more eccentrically against those around him, Homer leaves him alone without complaint. Since Langley mostly refuses to pay bills, the brothers end up in the house without gas, electricity and water, which they get from a public well. At first Langley only barricades the house, and finally he penetrates the tunnel system that still remains between the junk with traps to prevent intruders. The blind and now completely deaf Homer can no longer move around the house because of the traps and is restricted to a small cave with a desk and mattress and a corridor to the bathroom. When one of his traps kills Langley, Homer realizes in his last fragmentary record that he will soon die without his brother.

Reviews

Axel Knönagel ( DPA ) writes:

“Homer [...] lacks the possibility to describe the view of people and situations, but he more than makes up for that with sensitive representations of his sensory impressions and their consistently friendly interpretations. […] In short episodes, 'Homer & Langley' tells a story of the USA in the 20th century. Even if Homer sees nothing and is increasingly dependent on his mentally confused brother for contact with the outside world, he does not miss any of the important developments that shape the lives of people outside his home. "

Daniel Haas judges under the chapter heading "The invented truth":

“It means a double reparation that EL Doctorow has taken on the story: Not only because the fictional truth of the boulevard is now opposed to the imagined insight of fiction, but also because two figures in urban legends from the field of pathology into the World of art and culture to be saved. This goes hand in hand with a restitution of dignity and integrity. For this reason alone, 'Homer & Langley' is an important, poignant book. "

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The writer Daniel Kehlmann wrote in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about EL Doctorow and his novel Homer & Langley :

“My first Doctorow novel was Billy Bathgate , and it was through it that I understood for the first time - I was sixteen years old - what it really was: the voice of a novel. It is not identical with the style, rather it is the illusion of a person, identical neither with the narrator nor with the author, but closely related to both. Billy Bathgate's first sentence, the beginning of a book of long sentences, is too long to quote here, so let's take the beginning of "Homer and Langley": "I am Homer, the blind brother." A beginning so powerful precisely because we don't just hear the figure. In it we get to know Homer Collyer as a matter-of-fact, rather short-lived stylist, but at the same time there is a dark resonance alluding to the blind forefather of the epic, of whom the narrator Homer Collyer himself does not even think. It's not the blind Collyer brother, but it's not just Doctorow either, it's the voice of the novel. One can find the characters of a book uninteresting and yet love its voice, just as one can be gripped by the story and characters without taking pleasure in the voice, and when that happens the author has failed. "

expenditure

English

German

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Axel Knönagel / DPA: A strange pair of brothers. In: stern.de . January 20, 2011, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  2. ^ Daniel Haas: Historical house search. In: FAZ.net . December 23, 2010, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Daniel Kehlmann: He learned from Kleist and I from him. In: FAZ.net . April 7, 2011, accessed October 13, 2018 .