Talk of the town (novel)
Talk of the town is a novel by Siegfried Lenz . It was published in 1963 as a preprint in Die Welt and then as a book by Verlag Hoffmann und Campe , the paperback edition followed in 1965 by dtv .
action
The plot is set in a fictional small town on a fjord that is occupied by an alien power. Even if the names of the countries are not mentioned, the German occupation of Norway in World War II can be recognized as a historical context . A resistance group made up of young men, which is hiding in the mountains near the city, assassinated a German general who was on his way to the city commandant. His car was shot at, but he survived and fired back, injuring Daniel, the leader of the resistance fighters. The occupation forces then arrest 44 men from the city and demand that Daniel confront them and give up the resistance. Otherwise the hostages would be executed. They are mainly elderly men, the city notables, and some of them are fathers of the resistance fighters.
Daniel is being cared for in a secret warehouse. He wants to surrender, but his campaigners prevent him because they believe that his capture would result in the collapse of the resistance in the city. Christoph, a fellow warrior of Daniel, is revealed as a traitor and is supposed to carry out an assassination attempt on the commandant in a kind of suicide squad, which however fails. Even a joint appeal by the city's population to the headquarters remains unsuccessful. The resistance fighters then attacked a guard post of the occupiers and took hostages themselves. But the commander sticks to his demand and sets a deadline for Daniel's extradition. This is now hidden in an old school building by his former girlfriend Petra, the only woman in the resistance group. When the ultimatum expires, the hostages are shot in a quarry near the city.
After the end of the occupation, public opinion in the city turned against Daniel: he was accused of hiding out of cowardice or even feigning his wounding. During an argument, Daniel overreacts and kills a resident of the city in self-defense and is captured. He escapes from the prison hospital and then escapes the city with Petra. At some point he wants to write down the truth and oppose it to the falsifying "talk of the town".
Topic and narrative
The moral question that Daniel faces is the central theme of the novel. There is no clear answer to this question.
The first-person narrator is called Tobias. He is a young member of the resistance group and Petra's brother. Tobias repeatedly reflects on his own narrative role: He strives for an authentic reproduction of the events, but is aware of his subjective selection and representation. That's why he keeps talking to Daniel and asking him to tell the story himself from his perspective. Therefore, the novel also addresses how stories can change and falsify in retrospect through retelling and unreliable memories.
reception
Translations into English, French, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak and Czech appeared as early as 1965 and 1966.
In the review of the Spiegel , the narrative style is described as too “consecrated” and “pretentious” and it is also critically noted that Lenz is working on a topic that he had dealt with two years earlier in his play Time of the Innocent .
Werner Weber criticized in his review in the time the unrealistic "Edelton" sets the Lenz his characters in his mouth. He regards the hesitant, self-doubting narrative style as unnecessarily complicated and disturbing.
According to Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the novel is one of the "failed or highly questionable novels and stories published by recognized writers".