Salt on our skin

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Raguénez Beach (Brittany)

Salt on our skin (French original title: Les vaisseaux du cœur , literally the coronary vessels or as a play on words “The ships of the heart”) is an autobiographical novel by the French writer Benoîte Groult published in 1988 . In France he was initially discredited as pornographic because of his very revealing portrayal of a passionate love between a Parisian intellectual and a simple Breton fisherman. But it soon became a recognized literary bestseller, especially in Germany. The film of the same name by Andrew Birkin was made in 1992 .

content

Salt on our skin is about the secret love affair of an unequal couple. The first-person narrator George comes from the Parisian educated middle class. The lover - she calls him Gauvain - is the son of Breton farmers and later becomes a deep-sea fisherman. Since the Parisian family owns a holiday home in Raguénez , a small village in Brittany, where they regularly spend their summer holidays, they have known each other since they were young , but their different social classes cannot be bridged.

When she is 18 and he is 24, their relationship with each other changes fundamentally. At the harvest, both discover their erotic attraction for each other. They meet for a night swim on the beach. After that, they initially lose sight of each other. Only at the wedding of Gauvain's sister - he is now engaged to a girl from the village - does her passion flare up again. After a night of love, again on the beach, they part ways again. The narrator enjoys her student life in Paris , Gauvain does heavy work on a tuna trawler.

Finally, he visits them in Paris, where they indulge their passion in the hotel. On the last day, he asks her to marry him. He offers her to break off his engagement, continue studying, and do anything to adapt to her. But George can neither imagine introducing him into their social circles nor living a life as the wife of a fisherman himself. The cultural differences are too great. But she doesn't want to lose him completely either. Gauvain leaves Paris deeply injured and they seem to finally go their separate ways. The responsible Gauvain marries his Breton girl, has four children and goes to work at sea. George finishes her studies in classical philology and history, marries a successful man from the media industry and has a son. Professionally, she is happy, but her marriage turns out to be unhappy because her husband is an egomaniac and adulterer. At the age of 30, she made the decision to get a divorce. She moves with her son to the American east coast, where she teaches at a university as a lecturer in classical philology. Gauvain learns nothing of this.

During a vacation that George is spending with her son and her sister's family in Senegal, she runs into Gauvain again at a market. He confesses to her that he still loves her. But there is no way to be alone with her there. From now on, both have the desire to relive their adventure. It wasn't until more than a year later that chance came to their rescue when Gauvain was transferred from his shipping company to a tuna trawler in the Seychelles . There, in the Indian Ocean, they manage to leave their everyday life and obligations behind for ten days. Against the paradisiacal natural backdrop, the differences in class hardly play a role, which later lead to misunderstandings, small disputes and resentments.

Seychelles, La Digue island

From now on, the two consciously try to take time out together again and again, although the conditions for it are becoming increasingly difficult. One of Gauvain's sons had a serious accident, his wife had to undergo cancer treatment and eventually he moved his "job" off the coast of South Africa. In the years to come, they will only have a few short romantic vacations - in Burgundy, Jamaica and Florida, and a second time in the Seychelles.

George has since returned to France. She breaks the relationship with her American partner and, now at the age of fifty, marries her best friend, a French gynecologist, with whom she wrote a book together. Although this connection is intellectually and emotionally perfect, the longing for Gauvain's passion remains. During her annual guest lectures, he regularly visits her for a few days in Montreal. But the sailor's imminent retirement casts its shadow, because after that they will no longer be able to see each other.

On parting, Gauvain confesses to his beloved that he will have to undergo bypass surgery. (Hence the French original title "Les vaisseaux du cœur"). He dies in the hospital a few days after the operation. At the grave, the narrator realizes that the love for this man was the only real constant in her life.

reception

In France, salt on our skin was initially called "women's porn". Others called it "a hymn to the phallus". The work was “actually intended as a feminist act of liberation”. Over three million copies of the novel have now been sold worldwide. In Germany the book was on the bestseller list for two years and was sold ten times as often here as in France. “As in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia including Finland had record numbers. In the Mediterranean countries, on the other hand, the book was like lead on the shelves. ”In her explanation of this geographical difference, the author comes to two hypotheses:“ The first is that the image of the woman that emerges from the novel corresponds to the position which the woman occupies in the Nordic, Celtic, Germanic or Viking cultures. These peoples have powerful female characters in a wide variety of roles. ”Her second hypothesis is:“ The women who are known to buy books - all surveys prove it - are somehow tired of identifying with desperate female characters. An image of freedom shines in the salt on our skin , and this made the readers dream, especially in a puritanical country. "

The author's life experience (Groult wrote her novel at the age of 65) and the ease of her tongue-in-cheek style have enabled many readers to identify with the protagonist. The German actress Katja Riemann confessed to the author that the salt on our skin had changed the way she thought. Groult's linguistic ease also includes the open, sometimes frivolous, but never pornographic description of anatomical details and sexuality as a whole. “I think there was one detail that made people particularly shocked: that I dared to describe the male sexual attributes with irony. In the erotic texts the heavenly, always triumphant, glorious member appears in principle. That a woman speaks so disrespectfully of the insignia of male power is clearly an offense, an unforgivable assault. "

The immense success of the novel is not only explained by the fact that a modern, emancipated woman speaks here, who makes confident professional and private decisions, but also by the fact that her lover is an unusually ideal counterpart: intellectually inferior, but attractive and of great moral integrity. His sense of responsibility towards his family and his absolute loyalty to his great love make him a kind of modern prince charming. “It's true that George is not the most popular figure in the novel. Gauvain is touching because he is stirred up and torn by feelings of guilt by this love, which downright persecutes him. ”And the constellation of people guarantees that this love does not have to prove itself in everyday life, but, limited to a few stages, fresh and passionate for life remains.

shape

George Sand, painting by Auguste Charpentier , around 1835

Shortly after the husband's death, the first-person narrator begins to write down the story of her love. On the one hand, this story claims authenticity (by claiming that it actually happened), on the other hand, it also sees itself in the tradition of erotic literature. Her own name George [sic], based on George Sand , says it all: a great lover who defied the norms of society. Even their sensual language and morals were not allowed to a woman at that time. But “one was used to such transgressions with her, but for that she was judged very badly by posterity. Her lovers are mentioned much more often than her art. "

Allusions to literary or historical figures and the frequent theming of appropriate formulations play a major role for the protagonist George. This is already clear in the foreword, in which she argues about the first name she wants to give the deceased in the literary processing - and then decides on Gauvain ( Gawain ), a knight of the round table - this becomes clear. Later, in the now famous interview with Josyane Savigneau, she says: “Possibly because I had read many Breton knight episodes, I made my main character a sedentary man, a sailor, and named him Gauvain, that is, Gawein, after one of the Arthurian knights. Sage who also wanders across the seas. I wanted to get closer to the archetype of passionate love, that of Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet and other timeless couples. After their first night on the island, Gauvain and George enchanted each other as if they had taken a love potion like Tristan. "

Autobiographical background

The role model for Gauvain, the Breton fisherman in the novel, was in reality Kurt Heilbronn. He was not French, but American, based on his origins actually a Jewish German, who emigrated to America on his own in 1925, at the age of twelve, and initially made his way there as an assistant cook. He later became a pilot.

Benoîte Groult met Kurt Heilbronn in 1945, after France had been liberated from German occupation. As an officer, he flew a B-36 bomber . Groult and her sister were working as interpreters and hostesses for the Red Cross and taking American soldiers on sightseeing tours through Paris. Every afternoon they went to the tea dance in the officers' club " Hôtel de Crillon " on the Place de la Concorde . There they met “charming, well-fed young men. Their particularly positive quality was that they did not stay long in Paris. We basically went to bed with total strangers. [...] And then I fell in love with Kurt. We were united by a great passion that lasted until his death six years ago [2004]. We met for five decades, months, sometimes years apart. Every time we met it was like we were young again, like 18 year olds. Certainly because our passion was far from everyday life. Our need for one another never stopped. Because we knew that we would have to say goodbye after a few days. "

Kurt Heilbronn later proposed marriage to Benoîte Groult. But marriage to him was out of the question for her. “She would definitely have been the end of our love. He had no education at all. He wasn't interested in culture, he didn't read a single book. "

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from the interview with Benoîte Groult in EMMA magazine from September / October 2009.
  2. ↑ Benoîte Groult / Josyane Savigneau: Interview about salt on our skin . In: Benoîte Groult, life means being free . Munich: Droemer (1998), Chapter XI, p. 347.
  3. ↑ Benoîte Groult / Josyane Savigneau: Interview about salt on our skin . In: Benoîte Groult, life means being free . Munich: Droemer (1998), Chapter XI, pp. 348-350.
  4. ↑ Christiane Korff: The actress Katja Riemann and the author Benoite Groult talk about men. In: Zeit Online . February 26, 1998, accessed March 23, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Benoîte Groult / Josyane Savigneau: Interview about salt on our skin . In: Benoîte Groult, life means being free . Munich: Droemer (1998), Chapter XI, pp. 319-320.
  6. ↑ Benoîte Groult / Josyane Savigneau: Interview about salt on our skin . In: Benoîte Groult, life means being free . Munich: Droemer (1998), Chapter XI, p. 318.
  7. ↑ Benoîte Groult / Josyane Savigneau: Interview about salt on our skin . In: Benoîte Groult, life means being free . Munich: Droemer (1998), Chapter XI, p. 314.
  8. ↑ Benoîte Groult / Josyane Savigneau: Interview about salt on our skin . In: Benoîte Groult, life means being free . Munich: Droemer (1998), Chapter XI, pp. 315-316.
  9. ↑ See Frankfurter Rundschau of January 29, 2010
  10. ↑ Christiane von Korff: You can treat yourself as a couple with freedom. In: Brigitte Woman . Retrieved March 23, 2020 .