P. G. WodehouseRezensionen

In his latest novel "Cinema", German star author Daniel Kehlmann lets an English movie critic by the name of Rupert Wooster appear. As the only international attendee of a movie premiere in Salzburg in 1942 - right in the middle of World War II - Wooster engages in an English conversation that is a wonderful mix of eloquence and humour on the Wooster side, and misunderstandings due to broken English on the German guests' side. As this was one of the funniest literary chapters I've read in a long time, I wondered whether there was a real counterpart to Rupert Wooster. And of course there was! Even though I knew nothing about P. G. Wodehouse and his humouristic Wooster-Jeeves novels (I am German and P. G. Wodehouse isn't exactly famous among German readers in the 2020's), it wasn't very difficult to find out about Wodehouse's internment in Berlin and about Kehlmanns's ingenious idea to let Wodehouse appear as a relative of one of his main protagonists Bertie Wooster, only to have a conversation that is very much like a conversation in a Wodehouse novel.
Curious to find out more about Wodehouse and his literature, I decided to read "Joy in the morning", the book that made it into a top-100 list of English novels in the Guardian. This proved to be an excellent choice. Although I must admit that Wodehouse is a bit of a vocabulary and verbal phrase challenge to a non-native speaker, it certainly is also great joy to read. While I am not sure whether this book is an appropriate trainer for everyday conversation, I think it is the best compilation of English humour based on play on words that I have ever read. The plot reminds of a theatre comedy, as it develops around conversations among people that all know each other and have clear roles assigned to them. In the end, butler Jeeves solves it all. I am very thankful to Daniel Kehlmann for having directed my attention to P. G. Wodehouse. Indeed, it is "Joy in the morning" that Wodehouse began before and finished shortly after his internment in Nazi Germany. This book is the perfect link to Kehlmann's tribute to P. G. Wodhouse's humour in "Cinema", and it is a wonderful "getting to know the original Wodehouse humour" experience.½

Übersetzung einmalig: Trabant-Rommel Christiane