Ragtime (novel)

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Ragtime is a historical novel by the American EL Doctorow . It was released in 1975.

action

The novel is set in New York at the dawn of the 20th century and interweaves three levels of action. The first narrative strand focuses on stereotypical characters such as "Mother" or "Father" who are supposed to represent the average American population of the time. The second narrative is about Jewish immigrants "Tateh" and "Mameh" in the Lower East Side. The third narrative strand focuses on the life of the Afro-American pianist Coalhouse Walker, whose name refers to the German name "Kohlhaas": Similar to the story of Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist , he fails in the pursuit of social justice. Historical figures appear throughout the book, including financier John Pierpont Morgan , automobile manufacturer Henry Ford , actress Evelyn Nesbit , anarchist Emma Goldman and escape artist Harry Houdini . The psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud , Carl Gustav Jung and Sándor Ferenczi are on a business trip to the United States in 1909.

meaning

Ragtime received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975 after it was first published . Time magazine ranks the novel in the top 100 English-language novels between 1923 and 2005.

In its 1976 review of the novel, Der Spiegel wrote: " Doctorow [...] delivers one of the most important and at the same time funniest pieces of US literature in recent years: a true butter mountain of narrative episodes from what he calls the" era of ragtime ", thus the time when pictures learned to run in America, between the turn of the century and the First World War. "

In 2001, the Tagesspiegel referredback to ragtime in a review by Doctorow's City of God and wrote in this context: “ " Ragtime ", Doctorow's most successful novel, becomes a reckoning with the American dream [sic] ”.

The writer Daniel Kehlmann , who claims that through Doctorow's novel Billy Bathgate he understood what the voice of a novel is, wrote in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about EL Doctorow and his novel Ragtime :

“Ragtime” then. Perhaps the strangest of all historical novels, without whose role model I - but by the way - I would never have been able to write my novel “Measuring the World”. "Ragtime": a game with American history, told using the formal means of German romanticism. This is not a wishful fantasy of a German reader. Doctorow himself pointed out, among other things by the name of his hero Michael Coalhouse Walker, how much his novel owes to the style of Heinrich von Kleist and his novella "Michael Kohlhaas". A conjunction, all the more remarkable as Kleist remained almost without consequences in German literature - probably no classic was so much admired and so little imitated, and it is no exaggeration to claim that the only student, the former child soldier, was cheerful suicide and maybe greatest German narrator of the nineteenth century had, is an American novelist of our time. Kleist was a wild inventor who yearned for the strictness of law and objectivity; he wanted to give his stories, which are full of violence and confusion, the tone of the strictest reports. The unreliable historical work "Ragtime" also lives from this tension, while reading it we constantly ask ourselves what is actually true and what is invented, until we finally give up the question and believe everything and nothing in the book. "

Film and theater

The novel was filmed in 1981 by Miloš Forman under the same title . In 1996 a musical production authorized by EL Doctorow took place .

Latest issue

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See [1] . On: bookcritics.org. Retrieved July 23, 2015.
  2. ↑ http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html
  3. ↑ Novel as a supermarket . In: Der Spiegel , August 16, 1976. Retrieved October 2, 2013.
  4. ^ EL Doctorow: City of God . In: Der Tagesspiegel , January 5, 2001. Retrieved October 1, 2013.
  5. ^ Daniel Kehlmann: He learned from Kleist and I from him in the FAZ, April 7, 2011, accessed on July 23, 2014