Wednesday, July 22, 2015

On the death of E. L. Doctorow: Only Ragtime, then the oratory – FAZ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

      

 
 
 
 
 
     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
         

 
 
 
 
 
          The writer EL Doctorow lived from 1931 to 2015. ‘/ Span>
     

 
                                              

 
 
     
     
     
         
         
                                                             

He did not like to be called an author of historical novels, this giant of American literature. Perhaps bothered E. L. Doctorow the designation so because it something of their own, something aesthetically and content new and future created in each of his novels, spread the means of narration and expanded. Whether he undermined popular genres using postmodern narrative experimentation or the form of the historical novel endowed with a dual lens while looking in the past, but his gaze most accurately in the present and maybe even in an anticipated future. Most of all, this designation bothered him but maybe because his novels stoic testimonies are a deep urge, the decease of time to overturn the historical inside. Now he is himself died aged 84Jahren in Manhattan.


                         
         
         
                                                             
                                 

In Doctorow’s most beautiful late work, “Homer & amp; Langley” in 2009, the quirky eccentrics Langley Collyer gets the idea, his manic passion for collecting newspapers expand a “perennial current timeless newspaper” in which you can read everything, even his own death. And in his underrated novel “The Waterworks” (1994) tinkers the mad scientist Sartorius in New York after the civil war, which cost so many lives, to craft clever way to a conquest of death and embarks on the search for the fountain of youth.

                         
         
         
                                                             

anger against America in the heart

A brilliant craftsman was born in 1931 as son of Russian-Jewish immigrants in the Bronx Edgar Lawrence Doctorow. And he also sought, its Sartorius equal, for a kind of fountain of youth. He found him in the literature and with each new book. Under Doctorow a dozen novels, three short story collections, a play and numerous essays there is no text that a working model simply repeats – no, each time he started from scratch on, renewed and refreshed the American literature as that of the world. ” / p>
                         
         
         
                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

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During his apprenticeship as a publishing editor, he trained at the great literature of American chroniclers such as Norman Mailer and James Baldwin , However, as the works of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were Doctorow’s literary inclinations always transatlantisch. “Homer & amp; Langley “whose Homer blind is like the old father of the epic and the mind together with Langley a fictionalized version of the real existing eccentric brother pair, calling not only the two outsiders George and Lennie from Steinbeck’s” Of Mice and Men “on, but especially Flaubert “Bouvard et Pécuchet,” those foreign company facts collectors and Wissensklauberer French literature. And in Doctorow’s great success, “Ragtime” (1975), wearing the black musician Coalhouse Walker jr. Not only the Kleistian Avengers already in name, but also the Kohlhaas’s anger in the heart, not only directed here against an America that in the World War II slides, but also against a country that has its black population – whether in the publication time of the Romans, so the seventies, or at the time of Doctorow’s death today – treated as if the company is still not her.

                         
         
         
                                                             

selectivity between Poetry and Truth

Even though he did not want to be counted among the writers of historical novels, Doctorow had but the gifts of the best of them, that combination of individual interests and world wealth of factual Framing and fiktionalisiertem Detail – gifts which he estimated to Shakespeare’s plays and novels of Tolstoy so. On most excellent he shows his skill in “Ragtime” itself, the syncopated and exaggerated as the eponymous musical style, stringing together and repeated what historical set pieces spits out the story, for example from the life stories of Harry Houdini, JP Morgan and Sigmund Freud, for America, “a huge mistake” and is about the way we learn: “More than a decade would pass before Freud got his revenge and saw how his ideas began to destroy Sex in America forever. “

                         
         
         
                                                 
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Doctorow, who debuted in 1960 with "Welcome to Hard Times", was and remained a Bronx kid, he was one of the greatest chronicler of New York by soon two hundred years narrated and invented history and one of his greatest admirers ("joy rose from the city and filled the firmament like a melodic wind, a heavenly oratorio "); and he never lost his interest in the temporality of the story of how time seems caked firmly in Matter of the world, but can be removed through the art of their language and made to sound. In his last novel, which in a few weeks appearing also in German "In Andrews head," Doctorow finally takes only a logical view turning by directing his perspective on a character whose sense of their own lives gradually hard selectivity between Fact and Fiction has slipped. By looking into the circumstances of thinking is "In Andrews head" of the self-reflexive conclusion of an oeuvre that always asks the question of fictionalized history and life story: What happens when we tell? What is a writer?


                         
         
         
                                                             

In an interview Doctorow once said: "The life of a writer is so risky that everything he does is bad for him." The worst thing that could happen to the American literature, is the death of this writer, whose late Works only still refined and reflected were, as if far from the "Project Doctorow" at the end. What remains are Doctorow's very own fountain of youth, his twelve novels.


                                 

 
  
 
 
 
                       

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In memory of EL Doctorow

Only Ragtime, then the oratory

Jan Wilm

On Tuesday, the New Yorker writer EL Doctorow, a permanent reformer of literature died. That's the worst thing that could happen to the American literature.

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