Who can tell something like that: highly entertaining, fast-paced and original, extremely funny and at the same time always reflected and intelligent? Answer: Nell Zink can do all that. In “Virginia,” Zink demonstrated the double standards of American society through the example of a lesbian woman who marries a gay poet. In “Das Hohe Lied” Zink unfolds a social panorama that portrays the city of New York and its changes over several generations on the one hand, but is also filled with music, drugs and politics on the other.
Nell Zink: Avalon
Rowohlt publishers
Avalon
Author: Nell Zink Genre: Roman Publisher: Rowohlt Date of publication: 16.3.2023 ISBN: 978-3-498-00311-1
“Avalon”, the title of Zink’s new novel, is not just the mystical place from the world of legends to which King Arthur retreated after being wounded. It is also an album by the British band “Roxy Music”, a Toyota car model – and: “a tourist trap town”, as the narrator and heroine Bran calls the said place on Santa Catalina Island. Bran is initially social flotsam within a society that only claims opportunities for advancement, but rarely makes them possible. Her father emigrated to Australia when she was eleven months old. Nine years later, the mother searches for enlightenment and finds it in a Buddhist monastery, where she dies of cancer shortly thereafter. Bran stays with her stepfather and his family, in whose large nursery she is more or less imprisoned as an unpaid worker from the age of four.
As if she were wearing an invisibility cloak, the highly gifted and perceptive Bran initially goes through her life. Then Bran meets Peter. He’s from the east coast, is an intellectual prat and Bran’s great love. And she is his. Nevertheless, they are far removed from romantic love, keyword: class barriers. Zinc is unobtrusively allusive, but never exaggerated, highly ironic in tone, but only with a sure sense of when things have to get serious.
2023-06-28 09:30:04
#Nell #Zink #Avalon
