The little friend

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Grenada, Mississippi, train depot

The Little Friend (original title: The Little Friend ) is a novel by the American writer Donna Tartt . The book was first published in 2002 by Alfred A. Knopf , the German translation by Rainer Schmidt was published in 2003 by Goldmann Verlag .

action

The novel is set in the 1970s in the fictional city of Alexandria in the US state of Mississippi , referred to by many northerners as "The Lost South". The economic recession caused by the dismantling of the cotton industry can be seen here in the disused freight yard, in neglected housing estates and in closed shops in the city center. The life of the Cleve-Dusfresnes family, which has been unbalanced since the death of their son, is told in detail and in great detail. The focus is on the world of thoughts and everyday activities of 12-year-old Harriet: forays into the area with her buddy Hely, visits to the great aunts who look after her and tell her about the past, stays in the library, Sunday school or in the country's swimming pool Clubs etc. She lives with her sick mother Charlotte, her older sister Allison and the black housekeeper Ida Rhew in her parents' house. Her father Dixon has separated from the family. Harriet's grandmother Edith (Edie) Cleve, who runs the organization together with Ida, and great aunts Libby, Adelaide and Theodora (Tattycorum, Tat) live in the neighborhood. All are unmarried or widowed. Their social life takes place in the Baptist church and in the neighborhood of their residential area. In addition to this middle-class picture, which is expanded to include that of the well-to-do Hely Hulls family, the author portrays the social structure of the southern states affected by economic change and separated as a result of racial segregation : the black maids of the Hulls and Cleves, the white one for the ideology of white supremacy vulnerable lower class with no prospects for the future and, by the way, the privileged upper middle class of the beautiful and successful, to whom the Cleves once belonged when they were still living in the villa "Drangsal", built in 1809. The criminal act initiated at the beginning and the suspended "underclass" family Ratliff increasingly come to the fore in the second half of the novel.

prolog

It tells Charlotte's memories of the anniversary of the death of her 9-year-old son Robin twelve years ago. While 4-year-old Allison is playing next to baby Harriet on the terrace, the boy is found dead by his mother, hanging from a tree in the garden.

Kp. 1 The dead cat

Charlotte has suffered from depression since Robin's death, and she rarely leaves the bedroom. This illness and the taboo on murder in the family do not lead to a divorce, but to a de facto separation of the parents. Dixon (Dix) didn't care much about the family before and preferred to go hunting with friends after his banking business. Now, apart from a few visits (especially Christmas and Thanksgiving), he lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his lover Kay, the heiress of a small soft drinks company. In Alexandria this is known, only his family does not know.

The main plot begins twelve years after Robin's death and extends from May to the end of August. In the first chapters, the narrator focuses on the two sisters: the 16-year-old sensitive Allison withdraws into her dream world. She is filled with compassion for all creatures and suffers from the death of animals e.g. B. Robin's cat Weenie or a black thrush with a tar-glued wing. As the story progresses, the imaginative, idiosyncratic, clever Harriet comes to the fore. Your everyday life is described in detail. She keeps her distance from people, is interested in expedition reports and adventure books, v. a. Captain Scott's South Pole expedition, Kipling's Jungle Book and Stevenson's Treasure Island , stages scenes from the Bible with boys in their class and observes the environment with a serious, stern look. Hely Hull, the son of the strict director of the high school Claude Hull and his wife Martha Price, who is ridiculed for their tender, liberal upbringing methods, admires them and seeks their friendship.

Kp. 2 The black thrush

Influenced by a dream in which she is asked to act, Harriet decides to find the murderer with Hely as a helper and to avenge the death of her brother. She reads the old newspaper reports in the library, tries unsuccessfully to talk to her great-aunts, who avoided the subject, she asks her then four-year-old sister Allison, who is now often paralyzed in a half-awake state, to write down her dreams in order to find out whether they show something repressed , she interrogates Pemberton (Pem) Hull, her friend Hely's brother, who is the same age as Robin. After a few vague references, she suspects the children of the anti-social Ratliff family, v. a. the drug addict Danny, a classmate of Robin's, without being able to rely on more than vague guesses and a cursory observation of the housekeeper Ida. Danny, with whom Robin hung around and occasionally argued, drove Danny out of the garden ten minutes before the murder. Harriet tells her friend Hely her suspicions and her desire to kill Danny, and they develop adventurous plans to do so.

Kp. 3 The billiard room

A poisonous snake is said to be the tool of vengeance. Harriet and Hely therefore rummage around in the swampy terrain in the Oak Lawn Estates for some copper heads and a water moccasin otter and try to hold them with fork pieces, but the animals fight back, attack and the children have to run away in panic. Harriet's heat stroke ends the hunt prematurely.

The plot then shifts to a different social class, represented by the Ratliff clan and the drinker and gambler Carl Odum and his neglected children. Most of the Ratliff brothers live in a neglected trailer park with their grandmother Gum in the middle of the forest and run a methamphetamine drug laboratory camouflaged as taxidermy there under Farish's leadership . The parents were alcoholics and are no longer alive. In addition to the mentally retarded Curtis, the group consists of five brothers who have repeatedly slipped into crime and were temporarily in jail, namely Mike and Ricky Lee, who recklessly turned down a basketball scholarship for Delta State University. Farish is the head of the group, he spied on and robbed his territory as a postman for years. Since his stay in psychiatry, after he shot himself in the head while trying to escape, he has left the crimes to others and advises them, mainly burglaries and drug deals. Danny worked as a truck driver until his second arrest and is now hallucinating in constant smoke. Danny and Farish are frequent guests in the "Pool Hall" and play there for example. B. against the drunk Odum for money and grumble at the state, which steals their money through taxes, and the sheriffs, who rob them of their freedom. Hely, who occasionally forbidden forbidden horror comics at the bar in the hall, watches the scene one day as little Lasharon Odum, with a baby in her arms, tries in vain to get her father out of the billiard room. There he gambled away $ 400, which he had just won against Farish, with which he actually wanted to redeem his Chevrolet, which had been confiscated due to the lack of installment payments, from the car dealer Roy Dial. Only Eugene succeeded in breaking out of crime after he and Farish were sentenced to jail for car theft in the late 1960s and had an awakening experience while in prison . Now he is missionary in the spirit of the Pentecostal movement and tries at events to convert people to a Christian way of life that determines their everyday life. He is now visited by Loyal Reese, a fanatic of the sanctification movement from Kentucky, with his reptiles intended for the legally forbidden rite of snake handling , in order to recruit new followers together with him. Farish and Loyal's older brother Dolphus, who is imprisoned for life, arranged this meeting because they want to use the preacher's missionary trips to transport and distribute drugs.

Kp. 4 The Mission

The adventurous snake shop of the 3rd Cps. continues in the so-called Mission House, a tenement house of Dial where Mormons and Eugene Ratliff live. Harriet has discovered Loyal Reese's snake boxes on the pickup truck and wants to use them for her plan of revenge. Since she suspects that they have been parked in Eugene's apartment, she and Hely climb into the dark apartment through a skylight during a mission event between the two preachers, and they drag the box with a cobra into the garden. While Hely tries to cover up the traces of the break-in and close the doors, Eugene, Danny, Farish and Loyal suddenly return and Hely is blocked the exit and is trapped in the attic. Harriet frees him with a diversionary maneuver: she smashes the car headlights, smashes the tires and tells the Ratliffs that she has just disturbed the perpetrators in their action. They rush out of the house and Hely escapes. Before that he opened a snake box in a panic reaction. Upon returning to the apartment, Eugene is bitten and has to be transported to the hospital. Hely and Harriet use the brothers' argument with Loyal and the confusion of catching the reptiles to run away.

Kp. 5 The red gloves

The events of this chapter change Harriet's life. Once Ida quits after Charlotte criticized her work, which was the unintended impetus for Harriet's dissatisfaction with the lack of dinner, because the black housekeeper has been an important caregiver and surrogate mother since she was born. Basically, Harriet is dissatisfied with the gloomy family atmosphere around her emotionally ill mother, which contrasts so strongly with the modern, active Mrs. Hull. In contrast to Allison, who spends her saved pocket money on gifts on the last working day of the employees, Harriet cannot show her love for Ida out of pride and anger and travels to the holiday camp without saying goodbye to her, but she weeds Ida's vegetable patch beforehand and is eagerly looking for but in vain, after the red gloves that Ida gave her in the hope of getting her to take care of the garden together, but which she never used.

Harriet didn't plan to go to the Baptist Children's Camp at Lake de Selby this year, but it is now becoming her refuge. Because she fears a police investigation into her action against the Ratliffs. Together with Hely, she previously carted the snake box from the mission house to a bridge over County Line Road, which connects Danny residential area with the city center, waited for his sports car and at the moment of its passage threw the Königkopra onto his TransAm with the open top. However, it was not Danny, but his grandmother who was sitting in the car. She was bitten and treated in the hospital.

Kp. 6 The funeral

Hariett does not feel comfortable in the camp, she is treated as an outsider and teased. That's why she is happy when her grandmother picks her up after ten days. But it is a sad occasion, because Great Aunt Libby has died, caused by a chain of everyday banalities: Since the bus trip to Charleston is too expensive for the ladies of the parish, they decide to take the trip by private car. Edith, formerly a nurse, courageously chauffeurs her three sisters as usual: the beautiful, three times married Adelaide, the former teacher Tat and Libby, the father's unmarried housekeeper in the old villa "Drangsal". The journey begins with delays due to packing problems, fears of break-ins, complaints about excessive heat or drafts in the old car that is not air-conditioned, etc. and the following mocking, critical remarks that reveal structures and rivalries that go back to childhood. When Adelaide insists on turning back for their forgotten must-have decaf, Edith eventually turns annoyed and causes a traffic accident at an intersection. Everyone can return to her house, Edith with a broken rib and Libby, who was on the side of the impact, with a bruise on her cheekbones, but when Allison visits her, she complains of impaired vision and speaks strangely, but forbids the girl Call a doctor. After a stroke, she comes to the hospital and dies there after five days. This is a shock for Harriet and her sister because Libby, who had no children of her own, was emotionally her real grandmother, her refuge on difficult days, because of her caring and balancing nature. The funeral festivities, perfectly organized by Edith in the high Victorian house of the funeral home and the subsequent invitation and hospitality for the mourners in her house contrasts with the pain of the girls, because after Ida they lost their second caregiver in a short time. While Allison seeks diversion out of the house with her peers, Harriet retreats more and more into her loneliness, and her anger over the breakup of the family obsessively focuses on Danny. He, in turn, is looking for two children whom his grandmother Gum, who had been healed from the cobra bite, saw on the bridge over the street and who appeared during the snake attack in the mission house and then disappeared. He happened to recognize Harriet as he drove past the funeral home. He and Farish puzzle over the connections and suspect a conspiracy which the children set on them. They also mistrust each other, because Danny left his car to Gum and Farish arranged for Loyal Reese to visit with his snakes.

Kp. 7 The tower

In this chapter the author draws a picture of the Ratliff family. Eugene and Danny try to escape a life with no prospects, the drug trade and the dominance of the violent and increasingly paranoid Farish. Gum had never had a chance of property and prosperity in her busy life and now she has to see every day that her grandchildren are also in this cycle of no chance. Danny feels that Farish has taken advantage of him and does not participate appropriately in the profits from the drug business. He observes how his brother hides a sack of methamphetamines in an old water tower on the disused freight yard and wants to secure the drugs for himself in order to start a new life away from the family. Hely saw this and tells Harriet, who is now observing the area. She is in turn discovered and pursued by Danny and his brother. Danny finds out that she belongs to the Greve family, and he remembers Robin, who once invited him and the class to his birthday party at the Villa Drangsal. When he found out about the murder at school he was sad, while his poor family had no sympathy for the wealthy Gleves. They even enjoyed seeing the "great powers" of the "big-headed class" being trimmed down a bit. From this review it appears that Danny has nothing to do with the crime.

In the effective showdown between Harriet and Danny, she benefits from the tensions within the Ratliff family. Farish watches Danny suspiciously and forces him into the role of a servant. This is emaciated and weakened by drugs and loss of appetite. When he has to drive his older brother and his two aggressive shepherd dogs through the area in his sports car, he has impaired consciousness and shoots him and the two animals in a desperate attempt to rescue them. Harriet observed this from the roof of the water tower. She wanted to find out what Danny was doing in this place and discovered sachets with white powder, which she could not do anything with and which she tossed carelessly into the water of the tank. After the murder, Danny wants to get rid of his headache through a "nose" of drugs so that he can think clearly again and goes to the hiding place in the water tower. This is where confrontation occurs. Harriet jumps into the water tank for protection, Danny pushes her underwater to find out from her why she came here. When he discovers the wet drug package, he becomes angry and tries to drown the girl. However, she is able to hold her breath for a long time and float calmly below the surface through her diving exercises in the swimming pool, so that he thinks she has drowned. Then he climbs onto the wooden roof, breaks through the rotten boards and threatens to drown, as he cannot swim, while Harriet escapes via the ladder and flees home. She fell ill from the polluted water, collapsed, was unconscious for some time, was taken to hospital and examined by a neurologist for epilepsy . At this point, Farish is already in a coma from which he can no longer wake up. His brother is discovered two days later in the water tank and he confesses to the murder. Harriet hears about it in her sick bed. Their parents talk about Danny, as the "little friend" and neglected playmate Robins, who apologized to them that he could not come to the funeral because of the long way. Harriet now feels like Captain Scott at the South Pole: “[He] r had bravely tackled the impossible [...] but in vain. All daydreams had failed him. […] A great burden weighed on her, a darkness. She had learned things she had never known […] and yet it was, in a strange way, the secret message from Captain Scott: that victory and defeat were sometimes the same. "

Narrative form

The plot of the three- generation novel is presented essentially chronologically, partly with flashbacks, by an authorial narrator , whereby the main threads , mostly related to the members of the Greve and Ratliff families, alternate with one another. The narrator follows v. a. the actions of Harriet and, in the final chapters, Danny's. Towards the end, their two stories converge in a showdown and the events at the freight yard are told alternately from the two perspectives.

Literary classification and biographical background

Between the plot location, plot time and staff of the novel, v. a. Harriet's personality and her readings, and the author's biography, have some similarities: The action takes place in a region in Mississippi, where Donna Tartt, in Grenada , also spent her childhood. A leitmotif of the novel, like the other two, is a latent melancholy over the loss of innocence and childhood on the threshold of adulthood. When asked what she missed most of her childhood, Tartt says: “My great-grandmother, my grandmother and my aunt - that is, my family.” Then, after a long break, she specifies: “My mother's family. I have no contact with my father. When I speak of my family, I mean my mother's family. ”[…] Donna Tartt experienced her childhood as an outsider. While she herself read constantly - preferably books by Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad or Edgar Allan Poe, and by no means girls' books like Little Women - her school friends were interested in horses. […] Little Donna recited William Shakespeare and Rudyard Kipling, raved about the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and, at the age of 13, published her first poem in the Mississippi Literary Review . As a teenager, she went to school almost exclusively to take exams. She spent the rest of the time at home reading. As a child, Tartt felt happy in her role as an eccentric, not lonely. She emphasizes that she would not have become a writer if she found it difficult to be alone: ​​"It's my natural lifestyle."

When asked about such parallels, Donna Tartt does not want her little friend to be understood in detail as an autobiographical novel, but in it she wants to reproduce some of the basic moods that she perceived in her childhood in the southern states : for example the anti-intellectualism of the common people ( “There'sa horrible ethos in rural southern poverty that it's dumb to do well, it's stupid to succeed, and that people will laugh at you " ) or the upheavals in everyday life that took place there during the 1970s ( " And then somehow in the 1970s, they figured people wanted to go to malls instead. So it's all built-up. That's kind of happening in my book - you can hear the bulldozers, things are changing. " ).

In a portrait in Vanity Fair (magazine) the writer is presented as strongly influenced by the literary tradition of Southern Gothic - by authors like Mark Twain , William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams , whose melancholy and sometimes tragicomic stories “against the background of the crumbling southern states -Telling aristocracy of broken characters in mostly hopeless situations. But Tartt's style is also often compared to that of Charles Dickens , whom she herself describes as a great role model and especially appreciates for the 'warm-heartedness' of his novels. ”Overall, the author regards the book as a“ Southern novel (...), influenced by tradition of storytelling, which is alive there. "

Another motive for writing the novel was to write a book that is completely different from the previous novel The Secret History in terms of layout and structure : "After The Secret History I wanted to write a different kind of book on every single level, I wanted to take on a completely different set of technical problems. "

reception

criticism

Tartt's second novel is usually measured by the successful debut " The Secret Story " and compared to the psychological thriller as lengthy and difficult to read, especially since the reader expects an exciting crime story after the prologue:

“Like its predecessor, this novel aims to bewitch with a mixture of thriller and development novel, but, unlike its predecessor, it does not want to be primarily entertaining, but rather significant, as an homage to classics such as Stevenson, Dickens or Kipling. The little friend is a more multi-layered, more mature book than its predecessor - and yet less successful. ”The novel reads“ with difficulty, as a clumsy, overly long structure made of individual parts that do not really want to fit together. ”Other critics dislike the overconstructed ending and the "change of perspective that is not always convincing." "The clear sharpness of your first book has given way to a certain indolence which, although it fits well with the setting in the American South, is sometimes a bit tiring."

On the other hand, the southern states atmosphere with the social stratifications, the cautious, fine narrative style and the multifacetedness are praised: "This is how Harriet's story interweaves the most diverse literary genres into a lush painting, from the development novel to the family study to the chronicle of the southern states in the seventies." Donna Tartt proves in the best passages that she has developed, for example when she describes the Cleves, the Ratcliffes and the tranquil life in Alexandria, Mississippi. She evokes the ennui, which lies like powdery mildew over the small town, just as skilfully as the dreamy-ghostly atmosphere in Harriet's parents' house. "" This love of slowness [...] has possibly increased even more since the Secret History . Tartt is in no hurry to advance the plot, she gives her characters plenty of time to develop, carefree weaving in long passages in which she devotes herself to descriptions or reflections. As a result, the little friend sometimes seems a bit lengthy, despite the author's keen observation and her unusual and metaphorical style. "

Prizes and awards

In 2003 the novel won the WH Smith Literary Award .

expenditure

Original English editions

  • The Little Friend . Knopf, 2002, ISBN 978-0-679-43938-7 (hardcover).
  • The Little Friend . Random House, 2002 (audio book / download, unabridged version, read by the author).
  • The Little Friend . Random House, 2002 (audio book / download, abridged version, read by the author).
  • The Little Friend . Random House, 2002, ISBN 978-0-553-71403-6 (audio book / CDs, abridged version, read by the author).
  • The Little Friend . Knopf / Vintage, 2003, ISBN 978-1-4000-3169-6 (paperback edition).
  • The Little Friend . Bloomsbury, 2005, ISBN 978-0-7475-6549-9 (paperback).

German editions (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Vaiden and Memphis (Tennessee) are mentioned as neighboring places
  2. ↑ ZEITmagazin No. 14/2014 of March 27, 2014
  3. ↑ a b c A talent to tantalize Donna Tartt in conversation with Katharine Viser, The Guardian, October 19, 2002
  4. ↑ ZEITmagazin No. 14/2014 of March 27, 2014
  5. ^ Writers are Spies Welt am Sonntag, September 7, 2003
  6. ^ FAZ from September 6, 2003
  7. ↑ Neue Zürcher Zeitung of March 3, 2004
  8. ^ Oe1. ORF from November 21, 2003
  9. ↑ Neue Zürcher Zeitung of March 3, 2004
  10. ↑ FAZ. September 6, 2003
  11. ^ Oe1. ORF from November 21, 2003
  12. ^ WH Smith Literary Award List of winners since 1959.