Salt water (novel)
Saltwater (1999, English Saltwater , 1998), the fifth novel by the American author Charles Simmons (1924 to 2017). Like his first work, the Faulkner Award -winning Roman Eipulver (1967), engl. Powdered Eggs (1964), soon after its publication, it too received enthusiastic reviews in the USA, France and Germany. Salzwasser begins with the astonishing, now legendary sentence: "In the summer of 1963 I fell in love and my father drowned" and, as Simmons' introductory quote already suggests, is an homage to Turgenew's story, First Love , Russian Первая , which was published over a hundred years earlier любовь (1860).
content
(The page numbers in the following sections refer to the below-mentioned edition of the novel published by dtv-Verlag.)
For potential readers who do not want the tension of their own reading to be spoiled by an overly detailed rendering of the content, the cover text of the book only reveals the following: “As every year, Michael spends the summer with his parents on the Atlantic. But this time there is a change: The seductive Mrs. Mertz and her twenty-year-old daughter Zina move into the neighboring house. The openness of the two women not only fascinates Michael. Immediately he falls in love with the beautiful Zina and is helplessly at the mercy of her capricorns. But when he sees his romantic feelings cruelly betrayed, the innocent world of childhood collapses for Michael. "
action
The setting of the story is a small, elongated, sandy peninsula on the North American Atlantic, on which there are a few holiday homes, in which the same owners from the nearby town always spend their beach holidays every summer. So did fifteen-year-old Michael with his parents. First of all, it's all about the friendly relationship with his sporty father Peter, a young-at-heart bon vivant and womanizer who, himself a good sailor and an outspoken water rat, wants to toughen his son and raise him to be a courageous man and occasionally overshoots the mark. A little too recklessly, to the distress of the much more cautious and sensible mother, he risks sometimes too much, and even puts his son's life in acute danger, when the two of them go swimming on a sandbank off the coast.
The situation changes after two beautiful women, the self-confident young Zina and Mrs. Mertz, their fun-loving and revealing mother, moved into the neighboring guest house. While Mrs. Mertz promptly begins to flirt with Peter, Michael falls head over heels in love with Zina. But hopeless, because the twenty year old feels vastly superior to the fifteen year old in terms of experience. But she finds him likeable, devotes a lot of free time to him and patiently explains her hobby, photography. He becomes her docile student, who is in love, and whom she soon has more trust in, due to his honest innocence and naturalness, than her cosmopolitan friends from the city who come on a flying visit to the island. Although Michael senses from many small things and gestures that he is out of the question for her as a lover, he does not allow himself to be discouraged and even gives his old and loyal friend Melissa the pass for her after he has viciously abused her devotion. And when one day Zina turned to him struggling for help and confessed to him that she was in danger and that he had to protect her because "she was losing control" (94), he mistakenly referred this to himself and raised new hopes. All the more surprising for him is the discovery (prepared not least by his cynical friend Hillyer) that Zina does not love him, but secretly and unhappily his father. He realizes how submissive she is to him when he lies in wait for them one day and watches how his father tries to fend them off, slaps her on the ear and then runs her hand over her cheek and kisses the inside (116). Bitterly disappointed, he threatens to reveal her secret and blackmails Zina to sleep with him.
Peter notices from Michael's monosyllabic behavior that he is holding something behind the mountain. When father and son have brought the guests to the mainland in their sailing boat after the big beach party that ends the summer season, father and son have a discussion on the return trip. Michael boasts that he slept with Zina, his father “put on the mainsail so that the boat was in the wind and got up. [...] Then I thought he was going to hit me. He looked huge. I turned the rudder. The big tree swung across the deck, slowly at first, then faster. Father tried to duck, but the tree hit him in the head, so that he went backwards overboard and disappeared. ” (131) - Three pages later it says succinctly: “ Father was not found, so we did not have a funeral. “
The narrator never quite got over the affair. She never really let him grow up. The novel closes with the words: “I am now older than my father when he died. I don't know why I still feel like a child. "
shape
The emphatically unemotional tenor of the novel is reminiscent of the nouveau roman and corresponds to the disillusionment of the fifty-year-old narrator, who was shaped by his youthful experiences. Similar to the first movement of the novel, which is symptomatic of this tone and justifiably famous ( I fell in love and my father drowned in the summer of 1963 ), Simmons succeeds with such a narrative style to keep his love story free of kitschy noise and sentimentality, despite its sometimes maudlin themes and at the same time do justice to both the carefree nature of the young and the serene character of the adult Michael.
The central role that photography plays for Zina corresponds to this factual style. The objective image of the camera, artistically manipulated through the perspective of the photographer, reflects the central message of the novel: Everything depends on the viewer, everything on the perspective. Whether old or young, whether man or woman, whether loving or loved, whether perpetrator or victim - all this determines the views, the worldview and ultimately determines happiness and unhappiness.
For example, Zina wants to photograph the dune grass “just as God created it. [...] She took photos from all possible angles. From the vertical, the horizontal, and circling your object diagonally. She moved quickly and confidently. ” (20) And she also asks Michael to work quickly“ without thinking ”in order to educate him to be more spontaneous. “You mustn't think about it. That's the worst. The eye doesn't think, it looks. But you can't just click, click, click either. The camera has to be connected to something inside you, like your eye. ” (21)
Zina mistakenly believes that at the age of twenty she is already experienced enough to become Michael's teacher in the art of love and life through photography, but she has to ultimately experience in her unhappy relationship with Peter how she herself becomes a helpless student again.
The novel also owes a large part of its tension to the combination of sober language and limited narrative perspective. In this way the answer to the question of guilt for the mysterious death of the father remains in the balance. Did Michael turn things around on purpose or with affect? Was it self-defense or an accident that threw his father overboard? Yes, even the generally accepted fact that the father actually died is shaking. Because the formulations of the text here also seem very succinct and reserved: "Father was not found." (134) - "We were both good swimmers." - "He was a real water rat." (12) Should the experienced sailor, from who says in the obituary that he was "born in Neptune [!] in 1919" , that he really perished in his very own element - or that he did not take this opportunity (from his constantly jealous wife and the now grown up and rival son ) and stole from any further responsibility? The objective camera view leaves such questions unanswered.
Text output
- Charles Simmons, Salt Water . Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1998.
- Charles Simmons, salt water . CH Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung (Oscar Beck), Munich, 1999. ISBN 3-406-45291-4
- Charles Simmons, salt water . Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag GmbH & Co KG (dtv), Munich, 2004 (6th edition). ISBN 3-423-12900-X