James Gordon Farrell

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James Gordon Farrell , also JG Farrell , (born January 25, 1935 in Liverpool ; died August 11, 1979 in Bantry Bay , County Cork , Ireland ) was an English-speaking Irish-British writer who was best known for his historical novels the Empire Trilogy .

Life

His father Bill was an Englishman who worked as an accountant in Liverpool and as a manager often traveled to the Far East and India. His mother Jo was Irish; the family moved to Ireland in 1945. These geographical contexts later influenced his work. Farrell once remarked that in Ireland he was mistaken for an Englishman, in England an Irishman.

In the mid-1950s, he traveled to Canada, where he worked in various professions for seven months. After returning from Canada, he began to study law in Oxford at Brasenose College . He was a passionate athlete at university, but fell ill with polio . He suffered from the consequences of this disease all his life. This experience inspired him to write The Lung ; the motif of illness (in various forms) appears in all of his novels. He completed his studies in 1960. He also studied French and Spanish; He worked as a language teacher in France for two years.

His first work, A Man From Elsewhere , was published in 1963. This book earned him a two-year scholarship in New York. However, he later assessed this work only slightly. The essentially autobiographical novel The Lung followed in 1965 and an unsuccessful experimental work A Girl in the Head in 1967 .

His main work is the so-called Empire Trilogy , in which Farrell deals with the collapse of the British Empire. It consists of Troubles , 1970, unrest in Ireland in the years 1919–1921, The Siege of Krishnapur , 1973, the Sepoy uprising in India in 1857/1858 - for this book he received the Booker Prize - and The Singapore Grip , 1978, on the fall of Singapore in World War II. German translations of the trilogy were first published in 2013, 2015 and 2017.

When he presented the Booker Prize in 1973, Farrell accused the main sponsor of the Prize, Booker-McConnell , of exploiting their black workers in the Caribbean.

In March 1979, he moved to the Sheep's Head Peninsula in Ireland, where he drowned fishing in Bantry Bay on August 11 or 12 ; a wave washed him into the open sea, Farrell could not swim well because of his previous polio illness. He died, only 44 years old, just about the time he found his style and was starting to become famous. He is buried in the cemetery of St. James's Church in Durrus .

As an editor at Hutchinson Publishing , he discovered Beryl Bainbridge's talent .

Literary characteristic

His literary work is characterized by a detailed study of the historical sources and their extensive exhaustion (when writing The Siege of Krishnapur , for example, he ate many Indian dishes).

He rejected contemporary literary experiments, which he saw as an end in themselves. One can say that his best novels are actually formed from a sequence of absurd and picturesque locations and situations. Many passages are masterfully humorous. He viewed his heroes with understanding irony.

Honors

Works

prose
  • A Man From Elsewhere. A Novel , 1963.
  • The Lung , 1965.
  • A Girl in the Head , 1967.
  • Troubles , 1970 (Empire Trilogy 1).
  • The Siege of Krishnapur , 1973 (Empire Trilogy 2).
  • The Singapore Grip , 1978 (Empire Trilogy 3).
  • The Hill Station. An Unfinished Novel, and, an Indian Diary , 1981.
Letters and diaries
  • Lavinia Greacen (Ed.): JG Farrell in His Own Words. Selected Letters and Diaries , 2009.

Film adaptations

Troubles was made into a film by Christopher Morahan in 1988 .

literature

Essays
  • Bernard Bergonzi: Fictions of History . In: Malcolm Bradbury, David Palmer (Eds.): The Contemporary English Novel . Arnold Books, London 1979, ISBN 0-7131-6219-8 (Stratford-on-Avon Studies; 18).
  • Malcolm Dean: A personal memoir . In: John Spurling (Ed.): Hill Station. An unfinished novel and an Indian Diary . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1981, ISBN 0-297-77922-2 .
  • Elisabeth Delattre: You Monde romanesque au poème. "The World of JG Farrell" by Derek Mahon . In: Etudes Irlandaises , Vol. 27 (2002), Issue 1, pp. 93-105.
  • Elisabeth Delattre: Histoire et fiction dans Troubles de JG Farrell . In: Etudes Irlandaises , Vol. 25 (2000), Issue 1, pp. 65-80.
  • Elisabeth Delattre: Intégrer, exclure ou la genèse d'une œuvre. Troubles de JG Farrell in Irlande. Inclusion, exclusion, publié sous la direction de Françoise Canon-Roger . Presses Universitaires de Reims, Reims 2003, pp. 65-80.
  • Margaret Drabble: Things fall apart . In: John Spurling (Ed.): The Hill Station. An unfinished novel and an Indian Diary . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1981, ISBN 0-297-77922-2 , pp. 161-172.
  • Derek Mahon: The World of JG Farrell . In: Ders .: Collected poems . The Gallery Press, Loughcrew 1999, ISBN 1-85235-255-8 .
Books
  • Ronald Binns: JG Farrell . Methuen, London 1986, ISBN 0-416-40320-4 (Contemporary writers).
  • Fatma Kalpakli: British novelists and Indian nationalism. Contracting approaches in the works of Mary Margaret Kaye , James Gordon Farrell and Zadie Smith . Academia Press, Bethesda 2010, ISBN 978-1-933146-77-5 .
  • Michael C. Prusse: Tomorrow is Another Day. The Fictions of James Gordon Farrell . Francke Verlag, Tübingen 1997, ISBN 3-7720-2434-3 (also dissertation, University of Zurich 1996).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ St. James's Church ( Memento of October 12, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Farrell, James Gordon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish-British writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Liverpool
DATE OF DEATH August 11, 1979
Place of death Bantry Bay