As pleases God
As God likes it (in the original Au plaisir de Dieu ) is a French novel by Jean d'Ormesson (1925-2017) from 1974, published in Germany in 1976. It reflects the withdrawal of the Catholic nobility from the public eye and its rejection of the ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood .
action
The novel depicts three quarters of a century of a family history in France. The first-person narrator , born around 1900, looks back on his childhood in the 1970s during the time of President Georges Pompidou , during which he spent his summer holidays at the family palace Plessis-lez-Vaudeuil (the real castle of the family was the castle of Saint-Fargeau in Burgundy ). His much admired grandfather Sosthène rules there; the narrator's father is killed on the Chemin des Dames during the First World War . The grandmother dies out of desperation over an improper marriage. Nobody asks about happiness; one “does one's duty”. The grandfather eventually dies “in memory and in the past”.
The history of the family is closely related to the history of the country; she is committed to the monarchy , rejects the French Revolution and the tricolor ; can only slowly make friends with the republic. The family has held high state offices, has appointed popes and produced saints: When the great-grandmother travels to Rome, only attending a mass with communion celebrated by the Pope is appropriate.
The individual members of the family are introduced, according to Aunt Gabrielle, who organizes a salon in Paris that brings numerous avant-garde works to the public before, during and after the First World War, but lives in the family castle for three summer months a year. “We never went on trips”, you invite and have the highest dignitaries of the country to visit in the rooms of the castle. The pastor, the hunt , “the cult around the white flag of kings” and the family name were significant in this life .
But the family's wealth is dwindling; one regrets the introduction of compulsory schooling , conscription , voting rights and others and attaches to the Action française . A loving portrait is dedicated to the watchmaker who comes eight kilometers by bike from the next town on Saturdays to set each of the 365 clocks in the castle so that they strike at noon on Sunday and who dies on the way to the castle on Saturday . Time works against the castle owners. In the end, the castle has to be sold.
classification
The literary critic saw the novel as a work that could only be compared with In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust or with Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks ; the novel established the fame of the author, who was accepted into the French academy in 1973 and continues to appear frequently in the French media to this day.
filming
The novel was made into a film in France by Robert Mazoyer (1929–1999); the Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) dubbed the movie and several stations of ARD radiated from him in 1981 as As You Like God made.
Text output
- As God pleases: a family novel. Translated by Gerhard Heller, Ullstein-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt / Berlin 1994, ISBN 978-3548233833 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ p. 407 of the specified edition
- ↑ p. 61
- ↑ p. 23
- ↑ p. 15
- ^ Reference on the Academy website , accessed on May 29, 2013
- ^ Achim Klünder: Lexicon of television games, 1987-1987. , Bd. 1, KG Saur, Munich a. a. 1991, ISBN 3-598-10836-2 , here p. 692.