Swimming with elephants
Swimming with elephants ( Japanese 猫 を 抱 い て 象 と 泳 ぐ , Neko o Daite Zō to Oyogu , German "swimming with an elephant holding a cat") is a novel by Yōko Ogawa . The Japanese original edition was published by Bungeishunju in Tokyo in 2009 . The German translation, provided by Sabine Mangold, was published in 2014 by Aufbau-Verlag .
The novel is about a boy who limits his life as much as possible to playing chess .
content
The nameless hero of the novel grows up with a younger brother with his grandparents. At birth his lips were fused together; in a hasty operation they were separated from one another, the wounds being covered with skin from the child's calf, which later shows increasingly thick hair. This is not the only physical peculiarity of the boy: he always remains small, agile and weak like a child, which is apparently due to his fear of growing.
The boy realizes early on that growth can mean disaster. He regularly visits a department store with his grandmother and brother on the roof of which an amusement park is set up. In a secluded corner, a plaque and an iron ankle cuff commemorate the female elephant Indira , who, like the bull elephant Chunee in London , was brought to this roof as a young animal and there was an attraction for the children. Because the animal had not been removed in time before it was too big for the elevator and because Indira was terrified of using the stairs, the elephant had to spend its entire life on the roof of the department store.
Indira is not the only spatially restricted creature that the boy has to deal with. One morning on the way to school he finds the body of a bus driver in a swimming pool. Because this impression did not leave him, he soon went to the residence of the drowned man, a dormitory for bus drivers on a neglected site. There he discovers a discarded bus that has been converted into the residence of the caretaker of the dormitory. This caretaker, once also a bus driver, had to change his job after he became too fat to be able to sit behind the wheel. He invites the boy to take a look at the bus, which has been lovingly furnished with precious materials and which also has an old table, the top of which can also be used as a chessboard .
Soon the boy is walking in and out of the former bus driver and his black and white cat Pawn . The fat man teaches him the game of chess with great patience and repeatedly admonishes him to take his time with his decisions about the moves - time that the teacher bridges by constantly eating sweet things, which makes him keep increasing. The boy watches this development with apprehension, but at the same time is fascinated by the game of chess. A peculiarity that will determine the rest of his life is the habit he gradually develops: the boy does not sit at the chess table, but under the chess table and only leaves this position to move his pieces. He can tell by the noise which piece is being dragged where, and can obviously play chess just as imaginatively under the table as at home in his narrow alcove , on the ceiling of which his grandfather, a talented carpenter, will soon have to paint a chessboard for him.
His teacher finally encourages him to play outside of the bus, but this always leads to disturbing experiences. The boy easily wins a chess competition for children. But later he has to struggle with a remorse because he used the shopping voucher, which represented the price of this competition, in a game of chess for money in a park, whereupon the teacher points out that chess is never out of commercial interest, but for himself sake should be played. Early on he gave him a notation booklet in which the boy should record his parts, the aesthetics of which can be understood in these notes. Chess appears to the boy more and more as a joint action with the game opponent, which despite the honest attempt to win the game, has to show a certain harmony. The boy spends the money won to please his little brother by inviting him to a children's menu in the department store restaurant. Nevertheless, after this one experience he refrains from playing for money.
The master now tries to introduce the boy to a prominent chess club in a hotel. But the game, which has to be played as an entrance exam, ends with a disqualification because of the boy's habit of hiding under the table.
Soon after, the master dies one night in his bus. The boy joins them when they are trying to remove the corpse from the bus, which in the end only succeeds with the use of an excavator to demolish the bus. Pawn flees from the rubble, the dead caretaker is lifted out with a crane and the boy only manages to save the chess pieces and the old chess table from the bus and take them home. Eleven years old, at this point it stops growing.
A few years later, when he was fifteen, he received a visit from a gentleman who ran the “Chess Club at the Bottom of the Sea”. This chess club is also located in the hotel, but one floor lower than the renowned “Pacific Club”, in the hotel's former swimming pool. And it is only open when the other chess club is closed, so usually late at night. The gentleman, general secretary of the chess club, would like to recruit the boy for a special task: he should sit inside a chess machine and direct this puppet without looking at the playing field. The chairman's daughter donated the machine to the club. Originally designed as a writing doll, it is now being converted into a chess player. The face is modeled on the chess master Alekhine , which later earned the boy the nickname “the little Alekhine”. A black and white cat in the right arm, the machine sits at a table on which the chess board is located. His left arm is movable by a system of levers and sinews and is able to grasp and place chess pieces, but not to take the captured pieces off the board. The machine can also blink its eyes. The boy, who finally agrees to play in the doll, has to crouch in a tiny space and play the parts by ear and imagination. Since he is so dependent on assistance that clears the captured pieces and takes care of the notation, another important figure now comes into his life. The daughter of a deceased showman, who has previously been employed in the hotel, is entrusted with these tasks. Petite, pale and always with a white dove on her shoulder, she immediately reminds the boy of his imaginary friend Miira ( mummy ). Miira, so the adults in his neighborhood told the children, was a girl who once got into the narrow gap next to the boy's grandparents' house and never came out again. For years the boy had been talking to this Miira in the evening in his alcove through the wall; now he immediately calls the strange girl Miira. A distanced relationship develops between the two of them. It is Miira who massages the boy inside the narrow machine after every game of chess, because his cramped muscles can hardly be loosened after this ordeal.
One day an accident happens: a drunk man comes to the chess club, plays a game against little Alekhine and is then assaulted against the puppet. The sensitive machine is badly damaged, and Miira and the boy are shocked. When the machine cannot be used, the boy is used to play live chess . He has to hide in a storage room, his voice is alienated by a microphone. One day one of the actors in the chess pieces fell ill and Miira, who was previously entrusted with the repair of the robes of these pieces, had to step in and play a pawn. The boy is finally forced to use Miira as a pawn sacrifice . He has no idea what the consequences are, and only afterwards realizes that the live chess, like the commercial chess game, was not arranged for the sake of the game, but because the opponents are allowed to enjoy themselves with the captured "pieces".
Miira doesn't say much about it later. Nevertheless, the boy finally plans his escape. He asks his grandfather and brother, in whose carpenter's workshop the damaged machine is located, to convert it so that it can easily be transported in two suitcases. This has hardly happened when the daughter of the chess club chairman, an elderly lady who has often played against little Alekhine, shows up in the workshop and insists on playing a game with him. This will be the first game the boy's family can watch. Although none of them know anything about the game of chess, they are fascinated, especially the already seriously ill grandmother who dies the next morning. The chairman's daughter informs the boy during the game that the machine should be picked up the next day and that it is therefore high time to escape. She has noticed the devices for taking the machine apart and folding it up and leaves a newspaper advertisement in the left hand of the machine, in which a senior citizens' residence is looking for a talented chess player.
The boy then leaves the next morning with his two suitcases by bus to visit this facility, which is called “Etude”. She lies on a mountain; the last part of the route can only be covered by a ramshackle cable car, and it turns out that the retirement home is only inhabited by people whose great passion in life was the game of chess. The boy is accommodated there with his machine; His main task is to play chess with senior citizens who leave their bed at an inopportune time and cannot find another partner to play with. During the day he helps out with other work. Later, the daughter of the chairman of the chess club also appears as a resident of the home. But she has lost all memory that and how she once played chess.
One day the boy receives a letter from Miira that consists only of a single chess move: She has opened a long-distance game with him. From now on they exchange letters in which they only ever write down their current move. The boy finally tries to postpone the end of the game - it is becoming apparent that Miira will no longer be able to win. However, he no longer receives her last letter in which she noted this defeat: on a bad weather night he heated up the stove in the chess salon too much. It just so happens that none of the seniors is out there to play chess that night, and the boy falls asleep in the chess machine while the fireplace of the stove collapses, the carpet and wallpaper are scorched and the embers finally go out on their own - but only after the little one Alekhine died of carbon monoxide poisoning . When the sister superior transports the body in the cable car to the burial, the second gondola of the train goes uphill with a single passenger: Miira has made her way to the "Etude".
Miira then ensures that the notation of a game that little Alekhine played against a famous chess master is housed in a chess museum. This will remain the only trace of the boy, as the old people's home will later be torn down, the machine remains lost and the contemporary witnesses die.
Reviews
“The only thing that drives this novel is the aesthetics of chess and the character of the game as an expression of the player's personality. Of course, it is ultimately the human spirit that is celebrated here - but not as an ingenious calculating machine, but as an astonishing, silent medium of communication. The body, on the other hand, is presented as that fleshly thing [...] ”, stated Katharina Granzin. The author is less about chess as a strategy game or the dilemma of having to make decisions, which every chess player regularly faces, but on the one hand about the aesthetics of the game, which is reflected in her language - "Not understanding, but above all that Seeing the poetic analogies gives great aesthetic pleasure when reading Yoko Ogawa's prose [...] ”- on the other hand, the sadness that the human mind cannot exist separately from the body.
Lisette Gebhardt was not very enthusiastic: she thought Ogawa's text was “pretty crammed” and said the reader was being spun into a “sticky, creepy cocoon” and could finally ask “whether the book was written by the author or not maybe a programmed from her writing machine has since produced an almost perfect text, which you can, however, say the retort Exemplary. "Ogawa Operating the is a proven" retro machinery ", the hero is a mixture of the Chess Turk of Wolfgang von Kempelen and Grass' Oscar Matzerath and the cat Pawn probably go back to the Cheshire Cat . Overall, she sees swimming with elephants as portraying a moratorium or regression; symbolically, the hero returns to the lap of his unknown mother by withdrawing to the chess machine and finally to the senior citizens' residence.
Simone Hamm gave the novel a very positive review. She said: "The deeply sad novel Yoko Ogawas is a novel about a love that has never been lived, an unsatisfied passion, a novel about honor and guilt and good behavior, and how it can prevent one from living and loving." She was particularly fascinated by them Ogawa's art of language: “No matter how grotesque a circumstance, it comes very quietly with her. And that's exactly how she succeeds in destroying the usual perception, the usual gaze. She portrays the most absurd situations and the most terrible events easily, almost coolly. "
output
- Yoko Ogawa: swimming with elephants. atb 2014, ISBN 978-3-7466-3080-9 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Katharina Granzin, The life of a game of chess , in: Frankfurter Rundschau , February 3, 2014 ( online at www.fr-online.de )
- ↑ Lisette Gebhardt, The chess dwarf in the moratorium. Yôko Ogawa once again sends bizarre characters through their eccentric manege in "Swimming with Elephants" , March 2014 on www.literaturkritik.de
- ↑ Simone Hamm, "Swimming with Elephants". The little grandmaster , March 3, 2014 on www.deutschlandfunk.de