Stars and Bars (Roman)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stars and Bars (English original title: Stars and Bars ) is the German-language edition of the third novel by William Boyd , published in 1984 . The German translation by Hermann Stiehl appeared in 1988.

Stars and Bars is a picaresque novel about the journey of an English art historian to the American southern states.

His plot spans a few days in 1982. The protagonists are Henderson Dores (an English art historian working in New York), a number of colleagues and friends of Henderson's in New York, and a family in (fictional) Luxora Beach near Atlanta, Georgia. .

The novel consists of three parts - Twenty-Four Hours in New York , The South and one more time Twenty-Four Hours in New York - with a total of 23 chapters.

content

Twenty-four hours in New York

The 39-year-old English art historian Henderson Dores has been working as a valuer at a small New York auction house for two months. He came to America to fight his inferiority complex “because here shyness is banned, ostracized, forbidden”. He has met Melissa, his wife from earlier years, and is thinking of remarrying the divorcee who has now been divorced for the second time, but he also meets regularly with his lover Irene. The auction house commissioned him to view the collection of paintings by the millionaire Loomis Gage in Georgia that was being auctioned .

The South

Dores drives to the village of Luxora Beach, east of Atlanta, with Melissa's 14-year-old, severely pubescent daughter, Bryant, and meets the quirky Gage family. The 82-year-old Loomis Gage lives with his sons, his daughter and his housekeeper and their son in a large old house on an estate outside the village. Henderson is faced with a mixture of surly rejection, open hostility and exuberant hospitality emanating from a group whose social order and hierarchical structure is not clear to him until the end. The eldest son Freeborn, who lives with his heavily pregnant wife Shanda in a mobile home on the farm and does strange business, quickly turns out to be an aggressive would-be cowboy; the second son Beckman made up a life lie as a Vietnam War veteran - which he never was - and describes himself as an elementary particle physicist ; the attractive young daughter Cora openly confronts Henderson with his weaknesses; the eternally sullen housekeeper Alma-May provides the whole clan with strange dishes; her son Duane is never seen. The collection of paintings that Gage bought together in Paris in the 1920s with his fortune from parking patents actually includes a number of valuable paintings by artists such as Vuillard , Sisley , Braque and Derain, as well as some inferior Dutch landscapes. Henderson estimates the amount to be achieved at $ 2.3 million.

After Henderson went through ups and downs in a few days - he is threatened by Freeborn; a shepherd's hour with Irene in an absurdly modernist hotel complex in Atlanta turns into a debacle; Bryant falls in love with Duane and wants to marry him; his car is dismantled piece by piece in night and fog actions; Two gallery owners from New York appear and are also interested in the pictures - he comes to an agreement with Gage, who, however, suffers a heart attack and dies on the same day, so that the painting collection is passed on to Freeborn, who now wants to sell it to the competition. When Duane burns the pictures in a nocturnal car dairy - allegedly at the instigation of old Loomis - Henderson fled the south - with Shanda and the sedated Bryant in tow.

Twenty-four hours in New York

Hardly back in New York, Henderson is kidnapped by Freeborn and the two gallery owners - who turn out to be the operators of a forgery workshop -, threatened with life and locked naked in the workshop on the Lower East Side , from where he is able to escape. Clad in nothing more than a cardboard box, he wanders through Manhattan at night to his fitness club, where there is a final showdown with the gangsters, in which his black fencing trainer comes to his aid. At the end, Henderson receives two mails: a letter from England explaining the death of his father in World War II and a package from Cora: a small painting from the Gage collection with the rare mythological motif of Demeter and Baubo .

Themes and motifs

The central theme of the novel is the confrontation of cultures: the English and American; the New Yorkers and the Southerners; the world of the art trade and that of the decrepit southern nobility, thus of the new and old money. In many bizarre episodes, Boyd celebrates the possibilities and, above all, the impossibilities of this confrontation. Henderson ultimately seems to fail in his attempt to adapt: ​​“The struggle to adapt his personality to the new environment, to mix it with his chosen culture such as oil and vinegar, simply did not take place. This culture was too adamant; he and America simply did not find the harmony he had hoped for. ”Then, through a final show of strength, the naked hike through New York, he found a kind of reconciliation with the seemingly absurd American reality.

As in many of Boyd's novels, another motif is the erotic side of his anti-hero. Melissa left him years ago for adultery and now denies him "premarital" sex when starting over, so that he is harmless from the classy and unpredictable Irene. On the journey south, he was shocked to notice the blossoming charms of Bryant - Boyd here clearly points to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita . Finally, he approaches the melancholy Cora, but is horrified to discover that he has misinterpreted the situation.

Henderson's ongoing search for a father is part of his disturbed personality development: his father, who died in the war in Burma , left a letter to his unborn child; however, he was firmly convinced that it would be a girl, so that Henderson lives with the burden of "having abandoned his father by being a boy". In another absurd volte of the novel, Henderson finally receives a letter from England in which a comrade of his father's war tells him that he was killed in Burma by a pineapple can dropped from a supply plane.

The English original title Stars and Bars refers to the name of the original flag of the American southern states . The title of the German-language edition as a literal translation is misleading and has only very little to do with the content of the novel.

filming

expenditure

  • 1984 English original edition by Hamish Hamilton, London
  • 1988 German first edition, German by Hermann Stiehl, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt. ISBN
  • 1990 Paperback, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt. rororo 12803. ISBN 3-499-12803-9
  • 2010 Paperback, Berlin: Berlin-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8333-0563-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ All quotations from William Boyd: Stars and Bars; Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt 1988