Schmidt's insight

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Schmidt's Insight (English original title: Schmidt Steps Back ) is a novel by the American writer Louis Begley . It was published in 2012 by the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf . In 2011, Suhrkamp Verlag published the German translation by Christa Krüger. The novel continues the story of the retired lawyer Albert Schmidt from Schmidt (original title: About Schmidt , 1996) and Schmidt's probation (original title: Schmidt Delivered , 2000).

content

On New Year's morning 2009 Albert Schmidt is 78 years old and looks back on the experiences of recent years. 13 years earlier, he worked for the multi-billionaire Michael Mansour foundation in Paris, where he spoke with his daughter Charlotte and visited Alice, the widow of his recently deceased lawyer colleague Tim Verplanck. Schmidt falls in love with the beautiful woman, who is 15 years his junior and who only found out late about the homosexuality of her husband, who had died of AIDS . But although they met again and again in the following months, Alice inexplicably kept Schmidt at a distance. Eventually he discovers that she has had a relationship with the Bulgarian writer Serge Popov for a long time, a fellow student of Schmidt who was disgusted by his uncleanliness and his poverty. Although Alice assures him of her love, she does not want to part with her long-time lover, whereupon Schmidt abruptly ends the relationship.

When his daughter Charlotte is expecting a child, tensions reappear in their relationship. Behind Charlotte's demand for a fund to secure the unborn grandson, Schmidt suspects the greed of her hated husband Jon and his manipulative mother Renata Riker and rejects her. In an accident, Charlotte not only loses her child, but also remains sterile after a hysterectomy . She accuses her father of imposing a curse on her, falls into a deep depression and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital for inpatient treatment. Schmidt turns his affection to another child: little Albert, the son of his ex-lover Carrie, who still lives in his pool house with her husband Jason, while her indestructible ex-boyfriend Bryan hires out as his cat groom. But a DNA analysis robs Schmidt of the secretly cherished illusion that it is about his child.

As Charlotte's condition improves, father and daughter grow closer again. After Renata's manipulations turned against herself and destroyed her marriage, Charlotte realizes that her mother-in-law always turned her on against her father in order to avenge his rejection of her advances. But Schmidt has also changed and is finally treating his daughter with the consideration and care that he was unable to muster before. On the other hand, he has no scruples in the divorce proceedings against Jon Riker and uses the influence of his friend Mansour on his law firm. Schmidt got along brilliantly with Charlotte's new friend Josh White. Schmidt's relationship with his daughter is heading towards an unexpectedly harmonious family idyll, when she dies in a traffic accident.

Schmidt spends the following years in apathy. He continues to work hard for Mansour, staying in touch with Gil Blackman, and regularly sleeping with a woman he met through an ad. But in truth there is nothing that is still important to him in his life. Only when he learns of Popov's death does he dare to approach Alice again. Before the encounter, he becomes aware of his age and how much the last decade has drained him. He feels like the depraved homeless Wilson, Carrie's former chemistry teacher who he ran over many years ago. But Alice still has feelings for him and is ready to forgive him. She visits him on New Years Day in the Hamptons . When she asks him if he is ready to have a relationship the way she wants, he replies: "Yes, I do."

interpretation

Schmidt's insight tells the story of the retired lawyer Albert Schmidt from Schmidt and Schmidt's probation . In the German feuilletons, the novel is mostly seen as the end of a trilogy , while American reviewers expect another sequel and place Begley's Schmidt in a row with John Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom or Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe . The novel begins where Schmidt's predecessor ended: In Paris, Schmidt stands in front of a woman's door, unsure whether to ring the bell. It is Alice Verplanck who joins the familiar cast as a new character and thus sets the plot going, as Michael Mansour did in the previous one.

Meike Feßmann finds many motifs that are already known from Begley's earlier works in Schmidt's insight : Judaism, demarcation, the bigotry of the upper class on the American east coast, but in a dense network of biblical motifs she reads the book primarily as “one Catastrophic story heading for redemption ”. Schmidt, representative of a “society in which wealth has taken the place of divine omnipotence”, is “afflicted with disease, death and accidents with Old Testament force” and, like Job, has to test himself in the end to see whether he is “a better person despite all the strokes of fate can be". Sandra Kegel identifies the cause of Schmidt's self-examination in the fear of death. At the end of his life he is “ready for the first time to fight for a life that he never had.” According to Tobias Rüther, Schmidt says yes to a life whose rules he no longer determines. Claus-Ulrich Bielefeld reads the novel as a process of growing up: “In the end Schmidtie has finally become Albert Schmidt”.

For Harriet Dwinell, what distinguishes the novel from its predecessors is that it is much more deeply rooted in historical events. Schmidt witnessed the 1995 Oklahoma bombing and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , in which, like so many others, he wandered the streets of New York, disturbed . Spanning the terms of three American presidents, the novel expresses Schmidt's verdict on Bill Clinton's chaos and George W. Bush's inadequacy as he hopes for Barack Obama for redemption and purification of the nation. According to Meike Feßmann it go for Schmidt as for his country "to guilt, shame, remorse, repentance and forgiveness." In such considerations, it is for Tilman Urbach from Schmidt's insight , an American social novel in the tradition Updike, an "emotional history of the US".

One of the strengths of the novel for Ron Carlson is its openness: Begley would come as close to his main character as a diary writer. Alexander Theroux considers many of the main character's thoughts and feelings to be Begley's own, even if the author has always brusquely rejected the question of whether his Schmidt novels are autobiographical. Earl Shorris sees Schmidt as a thoroughly Jewish character who lives through a typical Jewish story. The fact that Begley hides this behind the mask of an anti-Semite has to do with the author's own story, who during the Nazi era could only survive in Christian camouflage. For Tilman Urbach, literature offers a possibility of camouflage, but the novel is not a “true-to-scale transfer” of Begley's biography, but only contains “facets of personality, highlights of one's own mental constitution”.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph Schröder: Redeemed from the bastard . In: Der Tagesspiegel from November 19, 2011.
  2. ↑ a b c Sandra Kegel : A transatlantic affair takes more than a helicopter . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 11, 2011.
  3. ↑ a b c Harriet Dwinell: Schmidt Steps Back . In: Washington Independent, April 16, 2012.
  4. ^ A b c Ron Carlson: Once More, With Feelings . In: The New York Times, April 15, 2012.
  5. ↑ a b Tobias Rüther: A man becomes quieter . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 13, 2011.
  6. ↑ a b Meike Feßmann : Job in Manhattan . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of December 6, 2011.
  7. ↑ Claus-Ulrich Bielefeld: Money alone doesn't make you happy either . In: Die Welt from November 19, 2011.
  8. ^ Claire Hopley: Book Review: 'Schmidt Steps Back' . In: The Washington Times, April 13, 2012.
  9. ↑ a b Tilman Urbach : Late apprenticeship . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from January 26, 2012.
  10. ↑ Alexander Theroux: Still Searching . In: The Wall Street Journal of March 24, 2012.
  11. ^ Earl Shorris: 'Schmidt Steps Back,' by Louis Begley . In: San Francisco Chronicle March 25, 2012.