Rock Springs
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Die karge Landschaft Montanas, ziellose Fahrten auf den Highways, flüchtige Beziehungen, Seitensprünge. Väter, die für ihre Verbrechen büßen, Mütter, die sich für immer davonmachen, Kinder, die das Vertrauen in die Eltern verlieren. In seinem berühmten Erzählband "Rock Springs" schildert Richard Ford Menschen, die unermüdlich versuchen, die Scherben ihres Lebens zu kitten, einen Rest von Sinn und Sicherheit zu finden. Es braucht schon die Meisterschaft eines Richard Ford, um ganz ohne Schwermut von Einsamkeit und Heimatlosigkeit im Mittleren Westen der USA zu erzählen. Mit der Leichtigkeit und Präzision, die seinen Ton auszeichnet, entstehen Geschichten voller Empathie – und sogar so etwas wie Trost.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stories in this collection read like textbook exercises in classic short story form: in each, a lifetime of sadness is suddenly crystallized around a momentan image, a discovery, a confrontationafter which a life has been irrevocably, if at first imperceptibly, changed. Ford approaches the genre with reverent precision and delivers an array of haunting, enduring images: a stalled train about to be engulfed in a brushfire; a misdirected collect phone call to a father from a son in trouble; a wounded snow goose swimming circles in a lake that moments before had been covered by the rest of its flock "like a white bandage laid on the water.'' Together, these portraits of violence and betrayal among the unemployed and unmotivated in rural Montana present an almost relentlessly bleak picture of difficult lives, and the frequent presence of children as witnesses to their parents' disgraces further darkens the vision. It may well be too dark for many readers. The accessible appeal of Ford's most recent novel The Sportswriter is missing here, in large part because the characters lack the wit and perspective that could give voice to their endeavors at self-awareness. Comparisons to Raymond Carver are appropriate, but where Carver's depictions of the basic struggle to make sense out of things strike a universal chord that transcends the narrow focus of the part of the world he examines, Ford's stories only outline that world and remain bounded by its constraints despite their intermittent beauty. First serial to the New Yorker and Vanity Fair; paperback rights to Vintage.
