Back to Blood (German Edition)

by Tom Wolfe, Wolfgang Müller (Translator)

Overview

Das Fegefeuer der Eitelkeiten für das 21. Jahrhundert
Clash of Cultures unter karibischer Sonne: eine brillante und bissige Satire auf den menschlichen Umgang mit gesellschaftlicher Realität.

Die Freiheit ist nur 20 Meter entfernt für den kubanischen Flüchtling, der sich auf den Mast einer Luxusjacht vor Miami geflüchtet hat. Aber dann wird er vor den Augen von Millionen Fernsehzuschauern in einer spektakulären Aktion live verhaftet. Und das ausgerechnet vom netten Nestor, einem Polizisten mit kubanischen Wurzeln, der unter den chauvinistischen Sprüchen seiner weißen Vorgesetzten leidet. Die ganze Stadt ist in zwei Lager gespalten: Für seine Familie und Landsleute ist Nestor ein Verräter, für die Weißen ein Held und Musteramerikaner. Soll der kubanische Bürgermeister ihn suspendieren oder mit Orden schmücken? Versaut ihm dieser Idiot die Wiederwahl?
Genüsslich und packend taucht Tom Wolfe ein in die verrückteste Stadt Amerikas: Miami, wo die Spanisch sprechenden Kubaner inzwischen die Mehrheit, aber die Weißen immer noch das Geld haben. Wo die Jugend am Strand den ewigen Spaß und die Rentner beim Schönheitschirurgen das ewige Leben suchen. Wo die Blutlinien mitten durch den amerikanischen Traum verlaufen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783641096816
Publisher:	Karl Blessing Verlag
Publication date:	01/28/2013
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	768
File size:	3 MB
Language:	German

About the Author

Tom Wolfe, 1930 in Richmond, Virginia, geboren, arbeitete nach seiner Promotion in Amerikanistik als Reporter u.a. für The Washington Post, Esquire und Harper's. In den 1960er-Jahren gehörte er mit Truman Capote, Norman Mailer und Gay Talese zu den Gründern des "New Journalism". Der vielfach preisgekrönte Schriftsteller (National Book Award u.a.) war mit Büchern wie The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) international längst als Sachbuchautor berühmt, ehe er mit Fegefeuer der Eitelkeiten (1987) seinen ersten Roman vorlegte, der auf Anhieb zum Weltbestseller und von Brian de Palma mit Tom Hanks verfilmt wurde. Es folgten mit Hooking Up eine Sammlung von Essays und Erzählprosa (Blessing 2001) und weitere erfolgreiche Romane, darunter Ich bin Charlotte Simmons (Blessing 2005) und der SPIEGEL-Bestseller Back to Blood (Blessing 2013). Zuletzt erschien Das Königreich der Sprache (Blessing 2017). Tom Wolfe verstarb im Mai 2018 in New York.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

March 2, 1931

Place of Birth:

Richmond, Virginia

Education:

B.A. (cum laude), Washington and Lee University, 1951; Ph.D. in American Studies, Yale University, 1957

Website:

http://www.tomwolfe.com

Reading Group Guide

1. The title of Back to Blood's prologue, "We een Mee-AH-mee Now," is a Latina character's retort to a "gringa's" request that she speak English, because "YOU'RE IN AMERICA NOW!" How has your town or city changed due to its immigrant population? To what extent have the elements in its melting pot melted?
2. Tom Wolfe made a dozen extended trips to Miami over two years while researching Back to Blood. He has said that writers should "leave the desk" in order to gather material for their books, and he admires nineteenth-century naturalistic novelists like Balzac and Zola for having done so. What are some of this novel's memorable details that could have been learned and conveyed only by Wolfe's direct observation? Would you know how the neighborhood of Hialeah looks or what really goes on at the Biscayne Bay Columbus Day Regatta if he hadn't been there and told us?
3. One reviewer noted that Back to Blood is both "a breezy, funny read...and an examination of what it means to be a man." In what ways did you sympathize with Nestor Camacho as he struggles with his various identities as a cop, a Cuban American, and a young man on his own? Did you expect the happy endings for both his career and his love life?
4. Ghislaine Lantier's French Haitian American father is horrified by the prospect of his daughter's dating "a Cuban cop!" Discuss the ways in which Professor Lantier manifests both the meaning of the novel's title and the more general theme of people's strong drive to fit in and rise.
5. In an interview, Tom Wolfe has said, "People may complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. They don't think in essays." Does this strike you as true?
6. How do your thoughts about "de-skilled," "hands-free" art jibe with the narrator's? Were you aware of how much money was at stake in the current art world before reading Wolfe's rendition of Art Basel Miami? Did you know about the business of forgery in the art world?
7. Novelist Tibor Fischer, in a review of Back to Blood, wrote that "for bringing the world, or at least a world, to the page, Wolfe is the boss." And the books editor of the Miami Herald wrote that "flamboyance is Miami's native tongue....There is nothing in this novel that couldn't happen." Do these comments about the veracity of Back to Blood make you want to visit Miami or run the other way? Do you consider place ormilieu to be important to your enjoyment of a novel? Discuss.
8. Magdalena Otero takes many chances with her well-being in her constant striving to assimilate and move up in Miami's pecking order. Which of the minor characters also exhibit her preoccupation with status? Can you think of any who don't? Discuss social ambition as a theme of Back to Blood.
9. Tom Wolfe has said that one of the writers he most admires is John Steinbeck. Although the work of these two writers differs stylistically, both attest to Wolfe's belief that "no single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony." What is your response to that idea? How strongly do you think the individual is shaped by his society?

Editorial Reviews

"Back to Blood, ein wildes, schlüpfriges, packendes, provozierendes Buch. Allemal große Unterhaltung."

EBOOK COMMENTARY

What holds our attention in Back to Blood…are Mr. Wolfe's two main characters: Nestor Camacho…and his former girlfriend Magdalena…Although Mr. Wolfe can be patronizing toward this pair, mocking them for their ignorance and naïveté, he also portrays them with genuine sympathy, using their earnest idealism as a prism by which to view the pretensions, social climbing and Machiavellian manipulation that burbles all around them. Nestor and Magdalena show that…Mr. Wolfe has been able to build upon the advances he made in creating flesh-and-blood people in A Man in Full (1998)—people who are not defined simply by their clothes, cars and verbal idiosyncrasies, but who actually possess something resembling an inner life.
—Michiko Kakutani

The New York Times

Two hundred pages into Wolfe's frantic potboiler about Miami's melting pot, a description of City Hall reminds readers of the vivid detail that made Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities) a literary icon. Yet despite flashes of "the right stuff", his latest novel comprises not an exposé of popular culture so much as a lurid compendium of clichés. The prologue features a scandal-fearing newspaper editor fretting as his wife tries to park her mini-hybrid at a trendy restaurant, but the action begins with marine patrolman Nestor Camacho speeding across Biscayne Bay. Unfortunately, his moment of glory dissolves into humiliation when he is condemned for arresting, after saving, a Cuban refugee. Resolute in pressing on, a bewildered Nestor works with reporter John Smith to unravel fraud at the city's new art museum and uncover the truth behind an incident of school violence. In the process, he meets elegant Haitian beauty Ghislaine, whose professor father desperately hopes she'll "pass" for white. African Americans, Russian émigrés, and Jewish retirees also appear: ethnic groups separated by language, tribe, and class; linked together by sex, money, and real estate. Filling his prose with sound effects, foreign phrases, accented English, and slang, Wolfe creates his own Miami sound machine—noisy, chaotic, infused with tropical rhythms, and fueled by the American dream. The result is a book louder than it is deep; more sensational than it is thought provoking; less like Wolfe at his best, more like tabloid headlines recast as fiction. (Oct. 23)

Publishers Weekly

Brilliant...I couldn't stop reading it....Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure.
— Washington Post

Michael Dirda

I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):

"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel.
— Time

Lev Grossman

"Back to Blood is a bracing vision of America's shifting demography and the immutability of ethnic conflict and class aspirations....Wolfe demonstrates that his skills as a novelist and a chronicler of America's class anxieties are undiminished."

Michael Moynihan - The Daily Beast

Within a masterfully strategized plot, Wolfe works his sardonic mojo to mock both prejudice and decadence and demolish the art world, reality TV, tawdry fame, and journalism in the digital age....This is a shrewd, riling, and exciting tale of a volatile, diverse, sun-seared city where 'everybody hates everybody.'
— Booklist (Starred Review)

Donna Seaman

"Wolfe, the impish, white-suited satirist, eviscerates a city-in-flux as he did with New York in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Atlanta in A Man in Full (1988). This is a shrewd, riling, and exciting tale of a volatile, diverse, sun-seared city where 'everybody hates everybody.'"

Donna Seaman - Booklist (starred review)

"Another big, sprawling, engrossing, hilarious, character-packed and action-driven novel by the master chronicler of modern America."

Bob Hoover - Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Preposterous, overwrought, contrived, wildly ambitious, and outrageously entertaining. It is, in other words, classic Wolfian fare."

Husna Huq - Christian Science Monitor

"A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right."

Washington Post Book World

"A typically overstuffed, overstated, delectably over-the-top portrait of modern Miami."

Dale Singer - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A breezy, funny read...and an examination of just what it means to be a man."

Sarah Fenske - LA Weekly

"With the sweep, particularity, and deliciously flamboyant language that have become Wolfe trademarks, Back to Blood tackles Miami and environs. Wolfeian description is seldom just pretty writing--almost always, the physical environment tells the person, tells the society."

John Timpane - Philadelphia Enquirer

"A rollicking good story. Akin to The Bonfire of the Vanities, the book has memorable characters and big themes."

Ken Armstrong - Seattle Times

"The premier 19^th-century novelist of the 21^st century, the thin white duke of American neon prose, Tom Wolfe may be the last of the literary showmen in the era of mopers and trauma specialists. Wolfe shows no signs of slackening energy or ambition in his latest novel, Back to Blood."

James Wolcott - Vanity Fair

A Man in Full (1998):

"The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written--not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist....The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting."

New York Times Book Review

"Immensely entertaining and insightful. Nobody does hedonism and excess like Miami, and Wolfe has managed to wrangle all of his observations into an expansive book that despite its huge cast avoids becoming unruly."

William McKeen - Boston Sunday Globe

"Wolfe is writing with as much brio as he brought to his debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, 25 years ago. Back to Blood demonstrates the author's persistent vitality."

Adam Langer - San Francisco Chronicle

"The novel roars and zips along like a cigarette boat, and even at 81 the Man in White proves to be a marvelous reporter. Call this bawdy humdinger the Bonfire of the Miamians."

Kyle Smith - People

I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):

"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel.

Lev Grossman - Time Magazine

"Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives."

Los Angeles Times

"Brilliant...I couldn't stop reading it....Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure."

Michael Dirda - Washington Post

"The novel's pointed observations are dangerously close to reality: Wolfe, Master of the New Journalism Universe, has done his homework and done it well. There is nothing in the novel that couldn't happen tomorrow right outside your window."

Connie Ogle - Miami Herald

"Gripping....[Wolfe] limns a dog-eat-dog world in which people behave like animals, scratching and clawing their way up the greasy social pole."

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):

"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel."

Lev Grossman - Time

PRAISE FOR TOM WOLFE:

Bonfire of the Vanities (1987):"

A big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let go."—New York Times Book Review

"A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right."—Washington Post Book World

A Man in Full (1998):"

The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written—not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist....The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting."—New York Times Book Review

I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004):"

Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era....A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel."—Lev Grossman, Time

"Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives."—Los Angeles Times

"Brilliant...I couldn't stop reading it....Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

From the Publisher