Innocence (novel)

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Innocence (English original title Purity ) is the fifth novel by the American writer Jonathan Franzen . The work was published in 2015 by the New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux , while the Rowohlt Verlag published the translation into German by Bettina Abarbanell and Eike Schönfeld . In addition to the eponymous character Purity Tyler, the focus of the novel is on the two men Andreas Wolf and Tom Aberant.

Wolf comes from an East German Nomenklatura family, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall developed into an internet activist similar to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange . Tyler is a heavily indebted college graduate who joins Wolf's project. Aberant is an American journalist who writes an investigative story about Wolf. Their paths cross over a period of thirty years. Thematically, the focus is on secrets, betrayal and surveillance. One of the theses of the novel is the similarity between the GDR surveillance state and the access to data about every person made possible by the Internet.

content

Purity, called "Pip", Tyler grew up in Felton , south of the San Francisco Bay Area , where her single mother Penelope had retired. She withholds all details of her origins from her daughter in order to protect her from the stalking of her allegedly violent ex-husband. Between the desire to “do something good” and the overwhelming obligations of a student loan, Pip works in his early twenties in telephone marketing for a parasitic environmental foundation that does not implement any real projects.

Privately, she lives in an occupied house and is hopelessly in love with a married roommate. When another roommate, a German named Annagret, tries to recruit her for the Bolivia- based Sunlight Project of her compatriot Andreas Wolf, Pip is less fascinated by the lofty claim of the disclosure platform, which has long outstripped WikiLeaks in terms of popularity , than the opportunity there to be able to research her unknown father. She lets slip a failed date with the mathematician Jason, ignores her mother's warnings and leaves for South America after exchanging email with the charismatic Andreas.

As the son of a member of the Central Committee of the SED, Andreas Wolf has a privileged youth in the GDR . A distant relative of his is spy chief Markus Wolf . The publication of a few rebellious poems primarily directed against his possessive mother leads to a kink in his career and a break with his parents. Since then he has lived as a tolerated dissident in the basement of a church. Allegedly, he is committed to helping young people who have gone off track, but secretly his main concern is to sleep with all of the female protégés. This is how he met 15-year-old Annagret, who is now 27 , who is being abused by her stepfather, a Stasi spy. He denies a sexual relationship with the girl he is falling in love with, and eventually murders Annagret's stepfather.

The Stasi seems to be holding its protective hand over the son of the well-known politician, who remains unmolested until there is a threat of prosecution due to the turning point that began two years later . Andreas steals the files on the murder investigation from the headquarters of the Ministry for State Security . On leaving the building, he accidentally stumbles in front of the cameras of the assembled press, which accompanies the Citizens Committee's first inspection of the Stasi files . With his charismatic nature and an improvised speech in which he coined the metaphor of the “sunlight” that was supposed to shine on state secrets, he soon became the committee's spokesman and a much sought-after media figure. That same evening he sets foot in West Berlin for the first time , where he befriends the American journalist Tom Aberant, to whom he is the only person to confess to the murder.

The friendship between the two men soon cools when Tom Aberant travels back to Denver . There he is stuck in an unhappy marriage with the artist and vegan Annabel Laird. She is the billionaire heiress of an American meat company, whom she despises as much as her family and everyone else. Desperately, she puts all her hopes in the relationship with the young Tom, whom she can dominate at the beginning of their relationship, until she has so far taken the air for his own development that he only wishes to free himself from her hostility to lust and esotericism to free. Even after the divorce, he can only break away from his ex-wife when he accepts money from her father to start an Internet newspaper . After this ultimate blow to her denial of parental property, Annabel leaves Denver and goes into hiding under a strange name, so that she does not find out about the billion-dollar fund her father set up for her before he dies.

Andreas Wolf has meanwhile become an internet icon. The relationship with Annagret has broken up, and he has, because of his revelations persecuted by various countries, settled with his Sunlight Project in Bolivia. In contrast to Julian Assange , he benefits from an impeccable public reputation, but he knows that the success of his project depends on his name. His growing paranoia is particularly directed against Tom Aberant, who knows his dark past. When he uses the resources of his project to research his former boyfriend, he tracks down his ex-wife Annabel, who has since taken the name Penelope Tyler, and he guesses that Purity is Tom's daughter, whose birth Annabel has kept secret from her ex-husband. He puts Annagret on Pip, lures her to Bolivia, where they both have an affair, and finally smuggles her into the Denver Independent , her father's newspaper.

In Denver, Pip's presence creates tension in Tom's relationship with his partner Leila Helou, but after some reports from his new employees about their irritable mother, the journalist suspects that she must be his ex-wife and Pip his daughter . She has come to appreciate her new employer and remorsefully admits that she was set to spy on him. Tom then travels to Bolivia to talk to Andreas. He asks his former friend not to make an autobiographical document about his relationship with Annabel, which Andreas got through his spy software, public. But Andreas feels rejected by the only friend he has ever had and sends the document to Pip to seek revenge. There is a dramatic scene on a cliff in which Andreas provokes Tom in vain to push him into the abyss. Eventually he himself jumps to his death.

In California, where she lives in the occupied house again, Pip tries to process the revealed secrets about her origins. An upcoming eviction of the building puts her under pressure, and she contacts the manager of her mother's trust fund to arrange for the house to be purchased. In return, she agrees to speak to her mother. Penelope, alias Annabel, feels as betrayed by her as by anyone else, but in the end mother and daughter reconcile and Pip can even convince her to accept part of the money. A re-encounter of their parents staged by Pip ends in mutual accusations and irreconcilable arguments. Pip hopes that she and her boyfriend Jason, who she has since dated, will do better.

Creation and publication

In December 2012, Franzen said in an interview that he had a draft of four pages for a new novel that would probably grow into a longer work. He had given up the illusion that he could ever write a 150-page novel, as he was always interested in the point of view of multiple characters.

In November 2014, publisher Jonathan Galassi announced that “Purity” would be released in September 2015 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Franzen had been working on the novel for two years, which, in contrast to “Freedom” and “The Corrections”, did not embody strict realism , but would have a quasi- fabulous character with mythical overtones. The chapter "The Republic of Bad Taste" was published in advance in The New Yorker in June 2015.

reception

"Purity" has been discussed in virtually all of the opinion-forming media in the United States. Michiko Kakutani was impressed by the new novel in the New York Times . With this work, Franzen had "expanded his voice range by an octave". He shows his ability not only to satirically take up the dark and lower human instincts, but also to portray the longing of his characters for cohesion and a new beginning. Kakutani has a cameo in the novel in which she tears the long-awaited Great Novel by Charles as "bloated and extremely uncomfortable."

German literary criticism accepted innocence with partly mixed reviews. Sandra Kegel praised the novel in the FAZ as “a large-scale narrative in space and time”, which “despite all the essayistic excursions did not become a thesis novel”. The representation of the characters was successful, only the first-person narration of the central character Tom Aberant remains “a foreign body”. The writer Adam Soboczynski estimated in the TIME the created by Franzen "mandatory [n] characters" in a "prime example of an analytical novel", but did not share the thesis of the analogy of the Internet and GDR.

expenditure

Original English editions
  • Jonathan Franzen: Purity . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-374-23921-3 . (American original edition, hardback)
  • Jonathan Franzen: Purity . Picador, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-250-09710-1 . (First edition as paperback)
  • Jonathan Franzen: Purity . Macmillan Audio, 2015 (audio book, read by Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker and Robert Petkoff, unabridged, 25 hours).
German translations

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Q&A: Jonathan Franzen , interview with Jonathan Frochtzwajg. In Portland Monthly on December 17, 2012.
  2. ↑ Alexandra Alter: New Jonathan Franzen Novel, 'Purity,' Coming in September . In: Artsbeat , blog on the New York Times website, November 17, 2014.
  3. ↑ Jonathan Franzen: The Republic of Bad Taste . In: The New Yorker, June 8, 2015.
  4. ↑ Michiko Kakutani: Review: 'Purity,' Jonathan Franzen's Most Intimate Novel Yet . In: New York Times, August 24, 2015.
  5. ^ Ron Charles: With 'Purity,' Jonathan Franzen tackles the Web, mothers, the truth . In: Washington Post, August 16, 2015.
  6. ^ Review notes at Perlentaucher
  7. ↑ Sandra Kegel : The Internet is the GDR of today . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of August 29, 2015.
  8. ↑ Adam Soboczynski : We are all defiled . In: Die Zeit , No. 36/2015 of September 3, 2015.