absolutely different, but great

The Eyre Affair
von Jasper Fforde

Bewertet mit 4.5 Sternen

"Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.

Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney"

Was für eine Ansammlung von verrückten Ideen! Moment Mal, der Krimkrieg, wann war der doch gleich? War das nicht irgendwann so gegen Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts? Und Jane Eyre, das habe ich doch vor langer Zeit gelesen, aber die Inhaltsangabe entspricht definitiv nicht der Version, die Thursday Next wiedergibt. Aber auch das wird sich ändern. 1985 und die Welt sieht ganz anders aus, als wir sie kennen. Auf die Frage von ihrem Vater, ob sie je etwas von einem gewissen Churchill gehört habe, antwortet sie mit nein. Und das ist nur eine der Antworten, die darauf hindeuten, was alles anders verlaufen ist (und die nichts von der Geschichte verrät).

The bookworms "had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and where happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands" - was das für eine Auswirkung auf die Sprache hat, müsst ihr selbst lesen.