Up in the villa
Up at the Villa ( english Up at the Villa ) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham , the 1941 Heinemann in London and Doubleday Doran in New York City appeared. In 1948 a translation into German was published in Zurich under the title There up in the villa .
Within just two days, Mrs. Mary Panton gave three suitors a basket. The 30-year-old widow takes the last of these rejections back immediately. Somerset Maugham's narrow work, subtitled in a 1975 Diogenes edition with “A criminalistic romance novel”, ends with a happy ending.
content
The beautiful Mary lives on a hill near Florence in an old villa that the English owner gave her for a time on favorable terms. Mary is all alone. Her husband Matthew was killed in a car accident one year before the start of the story after an unhappy eight-year marriage; her parents also died. The father worked in the Indian administration during his lifetime. From this circle, Mary is visited in the villa by the 54-year-old bachelor Sir Edgar Swift, a crown lawyer who is about to become governor of Bengal . Edgar has known Mary as a former old friend of the family since she was a child. On Edgar's proposal of marriage, Mary asks two to three days to think about it. Edgar accepts. He has business to do in Cannes , Mary forces his revolver to protect against Tuscan muggers and leaves.
At an evening party - the English are among themselves there in Florence - Mary meets the 30-year-old Rowley Flint. This divorced "man with a very bad reputation" is her second admirer. The nonchalant Rowley mocks the ambitious and successful Edgar as the "builder of the Empire ". For entertainment, a very young, slim man plays the violin in a very amateurish way, much to the annoyance of the hostess. Mary doesn't take the frivolous Rowley's marriage proposal very seriously and drives home in her car. On the mountain slope, directly below her domicile, she meets the bad violinist again. It is the art history student Karl Richter. The 23-year-old fighter against the Anschluss of Austria was just able to escape the concentration camp by escaping. Mary takes the uprooted, unemployed Karl to her villa for a night of love. The young man is overjoyed afterwards, but for Mary it was only a short adventure. When she confesses that she doesn't love him at all, he shoots himself with Edgar's gun. Mary calls Rowley in her distress. The two transport the corpse in the car and hide it in a bush.
When Edgar returns to the villa and awaits the answer to his request, he must first listen to a full confession from his chosen one. Edgar, a gentleman in every situation, wants to withdraw into private life under the new circumstances, but still marry Mary. The woman reveals to him that she does not love him; a life with him as a pensioner would be full of boredom for her. The righteous Edgar is afraid of the truth, but in the end can no longer contradict Mary and, deeply disappointed, separates himself from the woman he loves most.
Now Mary Rowley no longer refuses as husband. It turns out that her future husband owns a farm in Kenya . Mary wants to be far away from the corpse in the bushes. She suddenly hated Florence, which was once so beloved. On the one hand, she reveals to Rowley that she doesn't actually love him at all, but she's secretly inclined to this man. A task awaits the couple in East Africa.
interpretation
At the end of the novel, Somerset Maugham is very accommodating to the sentimental reader in that the flippant Rowley suddenly proves to be a good match - belonging to the English wealthy caste. It looks like Rowley wants to conquer the world with Mary in Kenya.
Current affairs from the late 1930s are incorporated into Karl's story. The Duce's Italy is also denounced - but only in a single sentence.
filming
Philip Haas filmed the novel in 2000 (see The Villa ). Kristin Scott Thomas played Mary, Sean Penn played Rowley, James Fox played Sir Edgar and Jeremy Davies played young Karl.
German editions
First edition
- Up there in the villa. 185 pages, linen. Steinberg , Zurich 1948
Used edition
- Up in the villa. Novel. Translated from the English by William G. Frank and Ann Mottier. Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 2005, ISBN 978-3-257-20166-6
Individual evidence
- ↑ engl. W. Somerset Maugham bibliography
- ↑ Edition used, p. 146, 7th Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 145, 11. Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 113, 10th Zvu
- ↑ engl. Philip Haas
- ↑ "Die Villa" in the German IMDb
- ↑ The DVD ( Memento of the original from September 11, 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. to the movie
