Nemesis (Philip Roth)

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Nemesis is the last novel by the American writer Philip Roth , published in 2010 . The German translation of the same name by Dirk van Gunsteren was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in Munich in 2011 . The main plot of the novel is based on a fictional polio epidemic in 1944 in Newark , the author's birthplace in the US state of New Jersey , and describes people's reactions to it.

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When a polio epidemic broke out in Newark, New Jersey in 1944, the twenty-three-year-old PE teacher Eugene "Bucky" Cantor, the main character of the novel, looked after those students who stayed in Newark on vacation on the sports field of his school one hot summer. Bucky Cantor is portrayed as a character guided by a sense of duty. He is accordingly disappointed and bitter that, unlike most of his peers, because of his severe myopia, he will not be drafted into the military to fight in the Pacific or in Europe in World War II.

The endeavor to remain at his post and to protect his wards from impending disaster is offset by his helplessness in the face of the spread of the epidemic . He successfully stopped the attack by some Italian thugs against his group of Jewish children. He is anxious that his students do not overexert themselves, drink enough, and rest a lot in the shade. But still more and more of his students fall ill and two of them die quickly. The general disturbance and the resulting emotional expressions of suffering, anger and fear increase. Parents indiscriminately raise allegations against Bucky Cantor, against the sport in the heat, against the health department, against suspected sources of infection. Fewer and fewer parents let their children go to the sports field.

Bucky Cantor's shock at the funeral of his first deceased student and in view of the increasingly violent reactions from parents of sick children expresses itself in angry theodicy accusations against God and his own ineptitude. His fundamental loyalty to his duty is shaken by decisions that arise spontaneously from his unconscious. During a conversation with the father of his friend Marcia Steinberg, he asks for his consent to their engagement. Although he perceives it as deserting, a few days later he gives in to the erotic temptation to travel to her holiday camp in the Appalachians to replace a fancy carer . He spends a few happy and carefree days with her before the first case of polio occurs there too. Most recently, Bucky Cantor fell ill with it himself.

After a leap in time into the 1970s, the further development of Bucky Cantor is confronted with that of his former student Arnie Mesnikoff. Both were severely paralyzed , but survived severely disabled. Bucky Cantor was shattered by the stroke of fate and the unproven self-reproach of having brought the epidemic to the holiday camp. He relentlessly broke off his engagement to Marcia Steinberg against her opposition and then struggled with casual jobs through his withdrawn life. He is still angry with God and himself. Arnie Mesnikoff, on the other hand, an atheist who sees his disability as one of the coincidences that one has to deal with in human life, has founded a successful company that converts apartments and buildings for the disabled.

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The narrative flow is essentially linear and is only interrupted by a few brief biographical flashbacks. The first two parts are seamlessly connected and are only delimited by the change of location. The first part Equatorial Newark takes place in Newark, the second part Indian Hill in summer camp in the Appalachians. Only when Arnie Mesnikoff fell ill with poliomyelitis towards the end of the first part does he become recognizable as the fictional narrator of the novel. In the short, third part, Wiedersehen , which takes place in the 1970s, he then explicitly functions as the first-person narrator .

While the first two parts are dominated by a direct narration of the event and the direct reactions, thoughts and feelings of the people involved, many ideological reflections of the narrator Arnie Mesnikoff, who only becomes clearly recognizable here, flow into the third part. In this sense, the novel is divided into two parts: a conventional narrative and a chronologically and artistically separated life-balance retrospective .

Ratings

The book received both positive and negative reviews from the critics.

Ulrich Greiner calls it a great novel at the time :

"In the report of the pleasantly mediocre Arnie, the hero Bucky Cantor appears to us as the victim of an incomprehensible tragedy that leaves no one who reads this sinister, truly magnificent novel untouched."

Markus Gasser writes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine :

“… It is Roth's secret that, through the inexplicable beauty of his style and structural tension finesse, he grants the reader the consolation he denies his creatures. Roth is a piece of home, every reading is a private experience, as if you were reading the very personal letter from a good old friend on which the sentence is stamped as a watermark: “Try not to be afraid, nothing is worth it. "Philip Roth, the world's most compassionate writer, remains unmatched in this:" Nemesis "comforts and strengthens even those who did not yet know how sad they are at heart."

Christopher Schmidt comes to a different conclusion in the Süddeutsche Zeitung :

“But the hero's remorse lacks a sufficiently stable objective basis. "He was driven by an excessive sense of duty, but had too little mental stature, and he paid a high price for it." Roth puts these succinct words into the narrator's mouth. But where does this “sense of duty” come from? And why does it have to drive the hero to ruin? Philip Roth may have sensed the deficit in his protagonist's literary motivation. By triumphantly staging Bucky Cantor in two disciplines, as a high diver and as a javelin thrower, he tries to elevate his hero, transforming him into an oversized figure despite its small stature. That is impressive, thrilling and unfolds some rhetorical force - but leaves a reader behind who in the end is not only amazed about Bucky, but also about his own enthusiasm. "

Trivia

Philip Roth came up with the idea for the novel Nemesis through his friend Mia Farrow , who suffered from polio in her childhood and therefore had to live very isolated from her peers.

expenditure

English

German

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ulrich Greiner: God is evil , Die Zeit , February 10, 2011
  2. ↑ Markus Gasser: The Black Vein of Our Fate , Faz.net, February 11, 2011
  3. ↑ Christopher Schmidt: War against God , Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 16, 2011
  4. ↑ Philip Roth, no complaints . Documentary by William Karel and Livia Manera, 2011, 52 min. - P: Arte France.