Sweet Hereafter: A Novel: Amazon.de: Russell Banks: Englische Bücher

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Atom Egoyan's Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter is a good movie, remarkably faithful to the spirit of Russell Banks's novel of the same name, but Banks's book is twice as good. With the cool logic of accreting snowflakes, his prose builds a world--a small U.S. town near Canada--and peoples it with four vivid, sensitive souls linked by a school-bus tragedy: the bus driver; the widowed Vietnam vet who was driving behind the bus, waving at his kids, when it went off the road; the perpetually peeved negligence lawyer who tries to shape the victims' heartaches into a winning case; and the beauty-queen cheerleader crippled by the crash, whose testimony will determine everyone's fate.

We experience the story from inside the heads of the four characters in turn--each knowing things the others don't, each misunderstanding the facts in his or her own way. The method resembles Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Gilbert Sorrentino's stunning Aberration of Starlight, but Banks's achievement is most comparable to John Updike's tales of ordinary small-towners preternaturally gifted with slangy eloquence, psychological insights, and alertness to life's tiniest details.

Egoyan's film is haunting but vague--it leaves viewers in the dark regarding several critical plot points. Banks's book is more haunting still, and precise, making every revelation count, with a finale far superior to that of the film. It's also wittier than the too-sober flick: the lawyer dismisses the dome-dwelling hippie parents of one of the crash victims as being "lost in their Zen Little Indians fantasy," which casts a sharp light on them and him, too. He's lost in his calculations of how each parent will fit into the legal system, and the ways in which he fits into the tragedy are lost on him. If only he and the Vietnam-vet dad could read each other's account of their tense first encounter, both of them might get what the other is missing.

Banks's wit is pitiless--it's painful when we discover that the bus driver, who prides herself on interpreting for her stroke-impaired husband, is translating his wise but garbled observations all wrong. The crash turns out not to be the ultimate tragedy: in the cold northern light of its aftermath, we discover that we're all in this alone.

From Kirkus Reviews

Banks returns to the provincial reaches of upper New York State (Affliction, 1989), this time to see how a community tragedy touches the lives of ordinary people. It's an early morning like any other in the civic-minded small town of Sam Dent--until a school bus inexplicably swerves from the highway and plunges through the ice of a water-filled sandpit, killing a number of children and leaving at least one crippled for life. In a compact but standard telling of the tale through the voices of four of the people involved--the bus's female driver; a father who loses his two children; a teenaged girl who faces life in a wheelchair; a right-minded negligence lawyer from N.Y.C.-- Banks offers both the pleasures and the topicality-driven excesses of the hyperfamiliar. Though there are gripping moments here--the lawyer's long-ago memory of once rushing his infant daughter to the hospital, for example--the impact of much else is diminished by the feeling that characters are type-representatives first and people second. The bus driver is married to a stroke victim; the bereaved father of two is a Vietnam veteran and a cancer-widower; the teenaged girl stuck in a wheelchair is also victim of her father's seductions; the lawyer's grown daughter, hopelessly lost to drugs, turns out also to have AIDS. Leaving no topic untouched, as if pleading to become a TV movie, the story moves toward a divisive negligence trial--which is averted by a plot surprise that may or may not convince most readers but that's rendered in an impressively skillful deposition scene. Melodrama and populist realism in a Banksian mix that often rings tinny but that's easy reading and may have popular appeal. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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Meaning Beyond Blame 2. Juni 2000

Von Brendan W Kerr

Format:Taschenbuch

Mitchell Stephens, the admittedly angry New York City negligence lawyer from Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter" runs through a litany of societal problems that have caused a blinding fissure between generations. "We have lost our children," he says, and though he blames drugs and the "sexual colonization of our young people by industry," he is too logical to attempt to focus his anger at vague ideas. Instead, he mounts angry cases against the cities, counties and states from which the children disappear. We see that his true occupation is avoiding the sorrow and guilt he feels because of the "loss" of his own daughter.

When children are lost, parents are left in a sort of amoral timelessness, without history or perspective. The future disappears, and suddenly everything is permitted. The freedom is lonely and terrifying, and parents, in an attempt flee back to the world of rules and consequences, turn their grief outward where it mutates into blame.

But "The Sweet Hereafter" is more than an examination of grief and culpability. The novel investigates the communities that arise when anger and blame are the primary means of social currency. By the end of the book we find ourselves within questions much larger than the individual lives involved, and though we are sad that two characters must be martyred, we are relieved, because we know that martyrs couldn't exist without the morality we thought we'd lost. Even the martyrs find can solace in an understanding their of roles: they are proof of redemption.

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YOU GOTTA READ BOOK AND SEE MOVIE 20. Mai 2000

Von RMurray847

The book is great. I read it about a year after seeing the movie. The movie was stirring and haunting, suffused with a feeling of loss and sadness. There was a lot of emphasis on the attorney's character, played so well by Ian Holm. Atom Egoyan is a terrific director (see EXOTICA! ).

The book is the same story, only different. I felt completely different reading it, while acknowledging that it is telling the same story. The same, and yet the tone is different, the details emphasized are different. And the character of the attorney has the same experiences as the one in the movie, but feels like a different person to me.

I recommend both very highly. How often can you read a book and see a movie, then say, "I loved the book, and I loved the movie too, even though it changed alot."

A short, insightful read 12. April 2000

Von Javier Echavarri

This book is a quick read, which somehow, for me is a disappointment. I found the premise very intriguing and I liked the way each chapter is devoted to one character, so we can see how the accident has affected each of them. The atmosphere of a small town is nicely depicted. Of all the characters, Nichole comes across as the strongest, and it is her chapter that I enjoyed the most.

Overall, a good book, full of humanity. I haven't seen the movie, but I am looking forward to.