Neuer Roman

Gestern nach dem Frühstück habe ich die letzten paar Seiten von "The Gap of Time" ausgelesen und war schlicht und einfach begeistert. Ich habe ja nun schon ein paar Jahre nichts von Jeanette Winterson gelesen - eine Schande. Schon nach den ersten Seiten war ich wieder von ihrer Sprache verzaubert, und das ich erst letztes Monat die Vorlage dieses Romans, William Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale" gelesen habe, hat dieses Buch zum doppelten Vergnügen gemacht. Schade nur, das "The Gap of Time" nicht ein paar hundert Seiten mehr hatte. Und glücklicherweise habe ich mir bereits ein weiteres Buch von Jeanette Winterson besorgt.

"The Gap of Time" ist - und das kann ich jetzt im Februar schon sagen - eines meiner Highlights 2017.

 

Heute in der U-Bahn habe ich dann mit diesem Buch begonnen. Der Anfang gefällt mir schon sehr gut, mal sehen, wie es weitergeht. Und es in diesem Jahr bereits mein drittes Buch, dessen Cover großteils aus den Farben rot-schwarz-weiß ist.

Ottessa MOSHFEGH

Eileen

Description: So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

 

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

 

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.