No man's land (novel)
No Man's Land is a novel by the English writer Pat Barker . It was first published in 1991 under the title Regeneration and was published by Hanser in 1997, translated into German by Matthias Fienbork.
content
No man's land represents the first part of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy , in which she deals with the psychological processing of the protagonists' experiences in the First World War . The other parts are The Eye in the Door and The Street of the Spirits .
The main character of the trilogy is Siegfried Sassoon , a poet and front officer, attractive and latently homosexual. Disillusioned, he demanded an end to the war from Parliament in 1917 and was sent to a mental hospital as a war tremor and then sent back to the front. In the Scottish Craiglockhart Sanatorium, he meets other traumatized war participants, including Wilfred Owen , who is supported by Sassoon with his writing and who apparently develops feelings for him.
The focus is also on the soldier Billy Prior and his girlfriend Sarah Lumb, a worker in a munitions factory, as well as the doctor WHR Rivers and his relationship with the patients. At the end of the novel, Rivers takes up a new job in London and Sassoon returns to the front lines.
The novel is based on biographies of the portrayed poets and on files by the historical Dr. Rivers at the Craiglockhart Military Hospital in Edinburgh .
criticism
"In the three volumes of her great story, Pat Barker undertook the courageous and yet completely logical experiment of describing the war almost exclusively from the perspective of psychiatry, the wounded souls, the mental confusion, the misery of the brain-damaged."
"Pat Barker extends the boundaries of antiwar fiction in her eloquent novel."
literature
expenditure
- Pat Barker, No Man's Land , dtv 1999, ISBN 978-3423126229 .
- Pat Barker, Niemandsland , Hanser 1997, ISBN 978-3446189218 .
- Pat Barker, Regeneration , Penguin 1992, ISBN 978-0141026534 .
There is also an audio book version read by Ulrich Pleitgen .
Secondary literature
- Karen Patrick Knutsen, Reciprocal Haunting: Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy , Waxmann 2010, ISBN 978-3830922957 .
- Karin E. Westman, Pat Barker's Regeneration , Continuum 2001, ISBN 978-0826452306 .