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Lädt ... Eines Menschen Herz (2002)von William Boyd
  
Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  Wassilissa | Sep 9, 2019 | 
Any Human Heart is actually a highly ordered and controlled encounter with that classic French literary form, the journal intime. Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh are Boyd's true ancestors. Both writers appear in Any Human Heart . Powell is "affable"; Waugh, or a drunken man at a party who Logan thinks is Waugh, "stuck his tongue in my mouth". Logan's true secret sharer, the real tongue in his mouth, is Boyd himself, of course. From his 1981 debut, A Good Man in Africa, onwards, he seems constantly to have been searching for a unifying identity across different fictions, trying to make sense of a life comprising a brutal public-school education, Africa in wartime, Oxford (where he did a PhD on Shelley), literary London and New York glamour: to a large degree, the plot of Any Human Heart . So when all is said and done, the heart the novel tries to dissect is the author's own. It is, as ever, an enjoyable spectacle for his readers. Any Human Heart, a novel, purports to be the compendious collected diaries of the fictional Mountstuart, and comes complete with little introductions by the author, footnotes and an index. It is not clear whether it was conceived originally as an extension of the spoof, or already had a life of its own, but the result is a distinctly odd book: a late-arriving lead balloon to the nicely timed punchline of Nat Tate. The narrative is made up of half-a-dozen diaries, which are devoted to different periods of Mountstuart's life of ambition and failure: schooldays, war years, dotage and so on. It ranges across the world - the novelist is born in Uruguay, raised in Birmingham and lives subsequently in London, New York, the Bahamas, Switzerland, Africa and the South of France - and takes in the century. It comes from a similar impulse in Boyd as The New Confessions, a novel in which he also tried to gain the form and pressure of our times through one life, though if Rousseau was the loose inspiration there, here it is Montaigne who skulks in the margins. Mountstuart himself, on the other hand, remains strangely insubstantial. He does things and meets people, but it’s hard to get much sense of his temperament; his observations on Fleming apply to himself, too: ‘I can’t put my finger on his essential nature . . . He’s affable, generous, appears interested in you – but there’s nothing in him to like.’ Mountstuart’s flimsiness as a novelistic character is supposed to make the book more realistic by acknowledging that personality is nebulous in itself. In practice, though, it has the opposite effect. His inconsistencies are a matter of convenience – an excuse for him to meet Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf and all the rest – and for too much of the time, Mountstuart is revealed for what he is: a device allowing Boyd to write about 20th-century celebrities in the pastiche idiom of a contemporary observer. Boyd hustles you through to the end despite all this, but it’s hard not to wonder if it was really worth making the journey. Gehört zu VerlagsreihenPenguin Celebrations (16) BeinhaltetAuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
William Boydâ??s masterful new novel tells, in a series of intimate journals, the story of Logan Mountstuartâ??writer, lover, art dealer, spyâ??as he makes his often precarious way through the twentieth Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineBeliebte Umschlagbilder
 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (4.1)
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4
Ich bin bis zum African Journal gekommen und habe dann festgestellt, dass ich eigentlich nicht mehr darauf gespannt bin, wie es mit Logan Mountstuart weitergeht. Ein bisschen was weiß ich schon, ich weiß zum Beispiel, dass die RAF noch auftauchen wird. Aber dennoch: Fesseln konnte mich das Buch nicht mehr. Und das zeigt vielleicht auch gleich, worin das Problem mit diesem Buch insgesamt liegt: Die fiktive Lebensgeschichte des Schriftstellers und Kunsthändlers Logan Mountstuart in Form eines editierten Tagebuchs ist durchaus interessant zu lesen und gut geschrieben. Sie soll das ganze 20. Jahrhundert abdecken, die wichtigen Entwicklungen in einer einzigen Biografie aufzeigen. Auf die Dauer aber ist der Inhalt additiv, wenn LMS erneut Prominente trifft und eine neue Liebschaft beginnt. Es ist zunächst ein aufregendes und spannendes Leben, v.a. bis zum Ende des zweiten Weltkriegs, aber mit der Zeit auch ermüdend. Ich sehe bei LMS nicht viel Entwicklung und Reflexion. Sein Verhältnis zu Frauen finde ich fragwürdig. Ich finde Kunst, Kultur und Politik spannend, aber auch hier wird es langsam langweilig. Das liegt vermutlich an der Tagebuchform, die wenig Spielraum lässt.
Wie gesagt ich habe das Buch lange Zeit sehr gern gelesen, aber irgendwann fand ich es nur noch ermüdend.
During my whole holiday I read this book and shortly before the end I noticed that it didn't interest me anymore.
I got all the way to the African Journal and then realized that I wasn't really looking forward to Logan Mountstuart anymore. The book couldn't bind me anymore. And that shows where the problem with this book lies altogether: The fictional life story of the writer and art dealer Logan Mountstuart in the form of an edited diary is quite interesting to read and well written. It is intended to cover the entire 20th century, highlighting the important developments in a single biography. In the long run, however, the content is additive when LMS meets celebrities again and again or begins new love affairs. At first it's an exciting life, especially until the end of the Second World War, but it's also tiring. I don't see much development and reflection at LMS. I find his relationship to women questionable. I find art, culture and politics exciting, but in this book things are slowly getting boring. This is probably due to the diary form.
As I said, I enjoyed reading the book very much for a long time, but at some point I just found it tiring. (