Ragged novel
The rag novel is the last novel published during Roberto Bolaño's lifetime under the title Una novelita lumpen, which was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2010 in a translation by Christian Hansen . It belongs to the Año 0 (year 0) series of the new millennium, to which Mondadori Verlag (Barcelona) invited seven Hispanic American authors to present the cities of Cairo, Madras, México DF, Moscow, Beijing, New York and Rome.
The rag novel is set in Rome and introduces a young pair of siblings who have become orphans in a car accident of their parents and who are trying to organize their lives from the family apartment in Piazza Sonnino.
content
The short novel is dedicated to Lautaro and Alexandra Bolaño, the author's two children. The plot is divided into 16 chapters, in which the first-person narrator Bianca describes the time immediately after the accidental death of her parents in chronological order. In the meantime she is in a different situation - " Now I am a mother and also a married woman " - and looks back to her youth: " (...) but not long ago I was a criminal " (p. 9) .
The parents die in a car accident during their first vacation together. The two orphaned children who are not yet of legal age as the only relatives drive to the scene of the accident near Naples and collect the bodies so that they can be buried in Rome. A sister of the late mother comes to the funeral with her two daughters. They never reappear later, so that " my brother and I were alone in the world " (p. 10). Since then, the two have felt in unison that there is no longer any difference between day and night and that “ everything is a permanent state of sun and light ”. Bianca thinks she's dying, over and over again. But one day follows on from the other, and the two of them go to school and receive their father's small pension, which would only allow them to have a very limited life.
They are looking for work. Bianca goes to a hairdressing salon and her brother to a fitness studio, where he has to make sure the premises are clean. They neglect school because they are convinced that they will not learn anything there (p. 13). Watching TV and video rentals become their main occupations once they are at home. Her brother also trains his muscle building in addition to his work and wants to impress his sister with his growing biceps. Both dream of a promising future. Bianca's brother complements his muscle training by renting pornographic films. He is convinced that they will teach him something because, like his sister, he has not yet had any experience with the opposite sex. Bianca borrows everything the video library has to offer. When she is on the move, she hears young people shouting “ fascism or barbarism ” from cars that drive past her with the windows down (p. 21, 42).
One day, Bianca's brother brings two older young men home from his place of work, a Bolognese and a North African (Libyan) who look very similar and pretend to be blood brothers. You stay in the apartment, move into the empty master bedroom and take a very careful part in running the household. Like Bianca's brother, her ambition is to develop “ winning bodies ” with nutritional supplements (p. 25). Bianca experiences her and her brother as well as herself as waiting, empty and bored (p. 28 f.). One day the two permanent guests disappeared. When they return, Bianca learns that they have unsuccessfully participated in a bodybuilding competition. Bianca lets them know that they can come into their room and that she would be ready to sleep with them. Without Bianca wanting to know which of the two is coming to her and she doesn't want to recognize them either, she sleeps with them alternately. She sleeps very little, sometimes only three to four hours for weeks (p. 84), so that it is noticeable in the hairdressing salon. (Pp. 37, 84). She is convinced that they are all feeling bad even though they are outwardly in a good mood. Their entertainment together mainly consists of following quiz shows.
When the economic situation worsens, all but Bianca lose their jobs. The orphan's pension and Bianca's wages are not enough to make a living. Bianca doesn't like her life. She " stopped being an orphan and was gradually moving into an even more sensitive area where it wouldn't be long before I was a criminal " (p. 54). She is aware that “ prostitution was the easiest way ”, but she avoids it. In reminiscence, she is astonished that in view of the hopelessness she did not “go straight into the air ” (p. 55). That was probably because she is a simple person. However, she is sometimes haunted by constant weeping (p. 59).
The Bolognese, the Libyan and their brother have come up with a plan to change their situation. From their workplace they know a man living alone, Maciste, who in the early 1960s (p. 63) won the title of " Mister Universe " and bodybuilding world champion through bodybuilding and as a film star in films about antiquity - with Titles like “ Maciste versus the Tartars ” (p. 83) - must have made a fortune. Bianca is supposed to serve as bait to scout his house for the safe, which they then want to empty. Bianca is ready to get involved with this man.
Maciste, alias Mister Maciste or Signor Bruno or Mister Universum, tells her when she gets to know him on a " night like noon in August " (p. 63) that he needs company (p. 71). Bianca pretends to be nineteen. She is convinced that she is not a whore if she sleeps with him, because she has criminal intent. She also learns his real name: Giovanni Dellacroce (= John of the Cross ). In terms of shape, he is tall and broad (p. 69), and appears huge among people (p. 106). Bianca cannot embrace him with her arms. He treats her tenderly with loving gestures. She comes to see him twice a week, once when he falls ill she takes care of him for a week. She tries to imagine the future and a life by his side, but this remains an “ empty picture ” (p. 99). Because Maciste’s future is nowhere (p. 83). In any case, more has arisen from her closeness to him than the plan originally intended, although she never forgets to look for the safe in the largely empty, neglected house that appears to be “ monastic ” in his room (p. 79).
“And when I lay in his arms and he carried me through the dark in a flash, or when I lay under or next to him in bed or in the gym, every millimeter of my body creamed, I silently thanked me for doing it Tresor hadn't found it yet ”(p. 81).
Bianca is happy that Maciste cannot see the face with which she confronts him: " a face full of expectation, a face that actually expected everything, from a loving word to a weighty explanation ". It appears to her like a “ fortune-telling machine ” that could show her the way into her future (p. 85). When asked why he was blind, she learns that as a driver, he caused a car accident in which two of his friends were killed and he lost his eyesight. Bianca tells him that she has been able to see in the dark since her parents' accidental death (but in her memory she describes herself as blind despite all the light around her [p. 33]). She is not doing well with anything. At home she is looking for a room of artificial silence and darkness, “ where I could cry and bend over in pain because I didn't like what I was doing ”, namely sex with Maciste and the two supposed friends of hers, which she also welcomed and enjoyed Brother (p. 90 f.).
After each visit, Maciste pays them out, just like he pays out an irregularly passing woman who provides him with the necessities for life. After all, she is certain that although Maciste regularly has cash, there is no safe in the house. She says goodbye to Maciste without accepting the last of his money and tells her brother's friends that they have to leave the apartment and that their only chance to get any money is to torture Maciste so that he can give them access to his safe, that she knows doesn't exist in the house. Bianca has to reorient herself because she doesn't want to die (p. 107). For herself and her brother, who is just as exhausted and who keeps crying lonely in the bathroom, she manages to have “ another real night ” after the disappearance of the friends and as “ weak, tired creatures who would like to see the dawn again Experience the fluctuating brightness of the Piazza Sonnino ”(p. 109 f.).
subjects
Adolescent precariat
“ Lumpen ” is a word that is common in the Hispanic language and has become colloquial in places to designate mainly young unemployed people. It comes from the area of left or Marxist social analysis and goes back to the term " lumpenproletariat ". The word already plays a role in José Donoso's Chilean literature . In Lumpenroman the word appears only in the title, but is present with the orphaned siblings, the two friends, but also in Maciste, who, like a modern gladiator , managed to gain wealth through his physical strength and gain public media recognition . That is why it is a role model for young men living in the precariat . For the time being there is no work and no material security for them:
“(...) they never found anything, not even something for a while, a drudgery of a few hours that brought a little money to stay afloat” (p. 53).
Bianca characterizes herself as a mole, rat or baitfish and feels transported to Algeria (p. 49 f.).
The city
The rag novel is part of a cycle of city novels written by seven authors at the turn of the millennium.
In the rag novel, Rome remains pale as a famous occidental city and reduced to a few street names. With Maciste as role bearer in so-called sandal films , the city is most likely to emerge as the imperial center of antiquity, where “ bread and games ” are offered to the depoliticized people . Of the fictional characters, he is most closely connected with Rome, but only since he was fifteen because he was born in Pescara (p. 63). In addition to the street names, the main station appears in the shadow with a fast-food restaurant and waiting room atmosphere (p. 28 f.). The peeling facade of Maciste's house gives the impression of vacancy (p. 62). The city quarters are only of interest to Bianca via the video rental stores located in them (p. 19 f.). Her apartment remains faceless: It " always seemed like an apartment to her, at most smaller with each passing day, with the echoes of thousands of hours of television (...) , so dead " (p. 93 f.). On the streets, young people shout “ brand new cars ” (p. 42) “ fascism or barbarism ”. With the worsening economic situation, Europe, Italy, Rome or her neighborhood appear on television for Bianca that are supposed to have something to do with it (p. 44). At the end, Bianca speaks of a “ thunderstorm that was not over Rome, but in the night of Europe or in the space between two planets, a silent and blind thunderstorm ” like from a strange world (p. 110).
Waiting for the future
The future is constantly thematized during the action, even if it only appears while waiting (pp. 12, 14, 37, 58, 61, 88 f.). That stems from the starting point, " that my brother and I were alone in the world " and that she has nothing to expect from her aunt and her two " hideous daughters ", because she apparently " laughed openly " at the funeral the two orphans (p. 10). The author thus indirectly alludes to a typical initial situation in many fairy tales, as shown most clearly in economic hardship in " Hansel and Gretel " or in " Die Sterntaler ", but also in many fairy tales in which children are at the mercy of a wicked stepmother are: " Cinderella ", " Snow White " etc. It becomes like a fairy tale when Bianca imagines that Macistes' wealth consists of gold coins that glitter in the depths of his bowels. When Maciste asks her one night what color his seed is, she looks at it in her hand and says that it resembles molten gold (p. 97 f.).
Maciste with his huge figure under the image of Saint Pietrino from the Seychelles (p. 98) becomes a kind of Christophorus for Bianca , who carried her in his arms “ as if in flight through the darkness ” (p. 81) while she was even in a dream sees a parrot weighing 5 kilos on his shoulder while marching through the desert collapse and die (p. 18 f.). In his blindness, Maciste also embodies an indication of the clarification of the future, even if Bianca's expectations of him as a " fortune-telling machine ", which Teiresia stands for in the tradition , lead nowhere, except that she will grow up over him and say goodbye to him a new reality is prepared, from which she is married at the beginning of the novel and mother, thus taking care of the continuation of life, appears as a first-person narrator.
With her wrong information about Maciste's safe and the disappearance of the Bolognese and his blood brother, however, in the end she is left with the horror of herself in the expectation of bad news. She has, however, a " gap found", " which my gap, and a shadow of my shadow was " (p 110).
reception
The reception in the German, Austrian and Swiss press is consistently positive. In the Hispanic American criticism, the novel encounters not only the overwhelming enthusiasm for Bolaño as an author but also skepticism, for example when it says in the Argentine “ La Nación ” that Bolaño mixed a strange cocktail in the rag novel that would put the book in the category of summer entertainment if this type of text did not only serve to make the critics frown and return to the major works of one of the most prolific and polemical writers of the last two decades.
Adaptation
The rag novel served as the template for the script for the 2013 feature film Il Futuro - A rag story in Rome by Alicia Scherson.
literature
- Roberto Bolaño, rag novel . Translated from the Spanish by Christian Hansen , Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-23546-5 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Book series Año 0 ( Memento of the original from May 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on December 11, 2010)
- ↑ See last interview with Bolaño, July 2003 . In this interview, Bolaño replied to the question of what his fatherland (patria) is, that no matter how cheesy it sounds, his home is his two children. (For members of the (rag) proletariat , children are the only property.)
- ↑ The quotation is based on the edition published by Hanser Verlag in 2010.
- ↑ See for example urban " lumpenizados " (~ made into rags)
- ↑ "Lumpen" from José Donoso (PDF; 724 kB)
- ↑ “The high level of youth unemployment remains Algeria's number 1 stability risk. Overall, over 25% of those under 20 are unemployed (over 30% in cities). More than 75% of all unemployed are under 30 years of age. ”See Economy in Algeria ( Memento of the original from January 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed December 12, 2010).
- ↑ See the review by Katharina Teutsch in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 2, 2010.
- ↑ See Blind Seers .
- ↑ See reviews by Perlentaucher and Christian Schachinger and Andreas Breitenstein for Austria and Switzerland in Lyrikwelt ( Memento of the original from November 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ Walther Cassara on January 9, 2010 (Spanish).
