David Maine: Anweisung von ganz oben - The Preservationist

Als Noah aufgegessen hat, stellt er die Schale beiseite und räuspert sich. Die Frau erkennt dies als Hinweis auf eine bevorstehende Ankündigung und schenkt ihm ihre volle Aufmerksamkeit. Noah sagt: "Ich muss ein Boot bauen." "Ein Boot", wiederholt sie.

Der Autor David Maine nimmt die Erzählung, wie Noah die Arche baute, wörtlich. Doch ein Prediger ist der US-Amerikaner nicht, eher ein Schelm. Er nimmt die in der Bibel recht karg geschilderte Erzählung und füllt die Lücken im Handlungsablauf kreativ, aber im Geist der Geschichte auf. Heraus kommt ein aberwitziges Abenteuer - und ein witziges obendrein: Denn gerade die praktische Umsetzung des göttlichen Auftrags lässt einen immer wieder schmunzeln. Maines literarisches Rezept ist die simple Frage: "Wie muss ich mir das vorstellen?" Wie fühlte sich Noah, als ihm Gott mitteilte, er wolle - bis auf seine Familie - die gesamte Menschheit umbringen? Wo kamen die Baumaterialien für das Riesenschiff her? Wie hat man an Bord verhindert, dass sich die Tiere gegenseitig auffraßen? Auf all diese Fragen findet David Maine überraschende, oft komische Antworten; sein Roman ist reich an Slapstick. Doch obwohl einen das Buch zum Lachen bringt, macht es die Religion nicht lächerlich. Maine erzählt seine, die ausführliche Version der biblischen Geschichte in einer betont schlichten Sprache. Dabei zeichnet er eingängige Szenen, die oft nicht nur unterhaltsam, sondern auch anrührend sind oder nachdenklich stimmen.

(Quelle: ↗wdr5.de, teilweise verändert.)

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David Maine: Anweisung von ganz oben
Bastei-Lübbe Taschenbuch
Roman
318 Seiten
ISBN 9783404922093
Amerikanische Originalausgabe: The Preservationist.
Publ. by St. Martin's Press, New York, 2004

The family consists of the 600-year-old paterfamilias; his unnamed 60-year-old wife; their three sons, Sem, Cham and Japheth; and the sons' three wives, whose names (of Maine's invention) are Bera, Ilya and Mirn. Like his father, Sem is a stolid man of faith and his wife, Bera, plods along. Japheth and Mirn are carefree youngsters. Cham, the craftsman who constructs the ark, found Ilya when he traveled to a nearby port. A pallid sylph from the north, she is familiar with a mysterious cold white substance she calls "snow" and has a hint of scientific curiosity. Oddly, the one thing that all of these people consider utterly unsurprising is the notion that the deity would inform Noe of His intended destruction and order him to create the vast ark that would save only them. Sluggish or skeptical, they immediately obey. Thus, paradoxically, The Preservationist's realism surprises us, although the book portrays extraordinary prophecy as common. By inverting norms, Maine avoids tedium and longueurs during the 40 days and nights of rain.

This pattern of the expected and the unexpected is echoed throughout the narrative, first by the different voices that tell the tale and then by the language that veers between the archaic and the willfully anachronistic. When Noe's wife describes him, she uses images of the ancient world: "Lizard skin and hands like roots. Big cloud of hair like a patch of uncut wool dragged through the dust . . ." Yet at other times, modern idiom seeps in. Japheth calls Bera's babies "twerps," and Cham calls the flood "the world's biggest demolition job."

Through the family's ordeal, Maine's eight characters in search of an acre begin to come to self-consciousness, concluding with the post-landing episode in which Noe's sons witness their father's drunken nakedness. As Adam and Eve once fell through guilt in the Garden, Noe's sons fall in the new Eden through shame. They have become the kind of people who ponder their salvation and their neighbors' drowning and ask, "Why me, and not them? Why them, and not me?" These are questions that couldn't be answered then and can't be now, and that's why they remain eternally valid.
(Source: ↗washingtonpost.com)

Noe says, -I must build a boat.
-A boat, she says.
-A ship, more like. I'll need the boys to help, he adds as an afterthought.
-We're leagues from the sea, she says, or any river big enough to warrant a boat.
This conversation is making Noe impatient. -I've no need to explain myself to you.
-And when you're done, she says carefully, we'll be taking this ship to the sea somehow?
As usual, Noe's impatience fades quickly. -We'll not be going to the sea. The sea will be coming to us.
«In this brilliant debut novel, Noah's family (or Noe, as he's called here), his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law, tell what it's like to live with a man touched by God, while struggling against events that cannot be controlled or explained. When Noe orders his sons to build an ark, he can't tell them where the wood will come from. When he sends his daughters-in-law out to gather animals, he can offer no directions, money, or protection. And once the rain starts, they all realize that the true test of their faith is just beginning. Because the family is trapped on the ark with thousands of animals, with no experience feeding or caring for them and no idea when the waters will recede, what emerges is a family caught in the midst of an extraordinary Biblical event, with all the tension, humanity, and even humor that implies.»
(Source: ↗www.audible.com)

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«This is Noah as you've never experienced him before: living, breathing, human. We get to know him an his family up close and personal. In Carolyn Chute's words, "Once they were strangers to us. distant as specks. no more! ... it is in the daily, the ordinary 'Noah family,' the 'what's for breakfast?,' the aching feet, the little insults or winks, the slap on the back, the gathering of insects in cupped hands that we know thme now as we know ourselves, the family next door preparing to face the unknown." Every member of the family contributes his or her point of view. Meanwhile, every animal, bird, and insect in the world shares the crowded, smelly, rudderless quarters while angels ride the thermals overhead.
Based, of course, on the biblical story, The Preservationist is a retelling, an amplification, and a wildly original, utterly memorable work of literary art.»
David Maine was born in 1963 and grew up in Farmington, Connecticut. He currently lives and teaches English in Pakistan. He is married to novelist Uzma Aslam Khan. The Preservationist is his first novel.

(Source: ↗HighBridge Audio)

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[...] What justifies Mr. Maine's appropriation of this biblical story? [...] He envisions the events in Noe's life with a mixture of awe and realism, and with a voice that is clear, distinct and (remarkable, under the circumstances) dry. "We'll not be going to the sea," Noe tells his wife, upon announcing that he must build the ark. "The sea will be coming to us." And, "This is one storm we don't want to be caught out in, hm?"

The wife is 14 [that's slightly incorrect; the truth is: 60 - JoHammonia] years old, and she is dubious. "So when Himself starts with the visions and the holy labors and the boat full of critters, what am I supposed to do?" she asks. She is also just irreverent enough about the pleasures of being married to a man six centuries old. "Himself was a novelty all right," she tells the reader. "Lizard skin and hands like roots. Big cloud of hair like a patch of uncut wool dragged through the dust a few dozen times." And when it comes time to multiply: "The way he carries on, I expect to be a widow by morning. Grunts give way to moans and then strangled shrieks, as if the old boy's being eaten by ants." There aren't many particulars that Mr. Maine leaves unmentioned.

"The Preservationist" is poised somewhere in the gap between holy visions and practical details (like the hygienic upkeep of a floating "barnyard in a box"). It is an elegant, inventive book and in no way a cynical one, despite the author's keen appreciation of the incongruous. After having to answer questions about just how much timber he needs for this undertaking, Noe closes his eyes and thinks, "Things were much clearer when God was explaining." The book resounds with the gravity of Noe's mission even as it invents the quotidian details of his story.

"A lesser man might be tempted to lie," Mr. Maine writes about Noe's calling. "A greater man might proudly refuse to answer. Noe is an ordinary man, 600 years old, conversing with giants, touched by God. He says, The Lord intends to destroy all the earth."

And why should those who are doomed agree to help him? "So you are not forgotten forever," he says, adding, "So that when we survive to tell our story, and our sons and grandsons do the same, your memory will live on within us." Indeed, by the time the book is in midflood, Noe's son Japheth is adding: "At least we'll have a Hell of a story to tell the grandkids, thinks I."

Mr. Maine, who grew up in Connecticut and now lives in Pakistan, brings a broad range of attitudes to this literary embroidery. He can write eloquently, as when he describes the animals finally debarking ("Elephants squelched knee-deep in marshy soil; big cats slunk away like sinners"). He can be almost flippant: "Rain pelts down like God's judgment, which it is."

And he can envision the roots of mankind's different races. [...O]ne of Noe's daughters-in-law rescues two babies, "shriveled and black as bats," before the flood begins [...].

In its shadings of light (gambling on the ark, using monkeys and water buffalo as currency) and dark (Noe's nightmare visions of those he could not save), "The Preservationist" is a book with a broad range. It is also quick and succinct, remarkably so when contemplating divine power. "He's a master craftsman I'll grant," says Noe's son Cham -- whose bringing on a curse for mocking his father's nakedness is one more of the biblical events that this book dramatizes. "But unlike most such He's short on respect for the things He builds and a touch too eager to reduce them to dust."

"The Preservationist" establishes both its author's temerity and his talent with that kind of observation. And it has the audacity to ask the ultimate question about the flood: Why did God do it? The book's characters have various answers, from "because he wants to encourage us to do better" to "because he can." But the one that sticks comes from Japheth, and captures the no-nonsense vigor of this novel: "Because He's the boss and don't you forget it."

(Source: ↗The New York Times)

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In The Preservationist (St. Martin's; 230 pages), first-time novelist David Maine picks on Noah again, and with good reason. The story of Noah, crowded with incident though it is, gets just four brief chapters in Genesis, and Maine has a terrific time romping around in the gaps between the verses, mouthing off in the somber silences between those Old Testament phrases. How does it feel to be 600 years old, as Noe (Maine uses archaic spellings for biblical names) was at the time of the flood? The Bible offhandedly mentions giants — what were those dudes like? Noe's three sons had wives, who presumably had names and personalities and feelings of their own. For Maine, the devilment is in those kinds of details.

As it turns out, much of the fun of The Preservationist lies with Noe's daughters-in-law, who furnish him with a chatty, catty shipboard peanut gallery. His eldest son Sem (usually spelled Shem) is married to unflappable, pragmatic Bera, who gets stuck with a lot of the animal-gathering chores. "The problem with people who think that God will provide," she remarks tartly, "is that they think God will provide." Cham (Ham)--the most skeptical of the sons and the most sympathetic — is paired with mysterious, icy Ilya, a refugee from a northern land who subjects Noe's religious zeal to intellectual scrutiny. "Only a man's god," she snaps, "would show love for his creation by destroying it."

Of course, Noe has the toughest job, as both servant of an enigmatic, irascible deity and sitcom father to that feuding brood. Maine treats him irreverently, but if he knocks the patriarch down a peg, it's only so that we can re-encounter the hoary Old Testament icon afresh as a sensual, fallible human being and really appreciate his greatness and his sacrifice. The Preservationist reminds us that being God's servant 24/7 is both the ultimate privilege and a hell of a lot of hard work, and Noe is the hardest-working man in the Bible.

There is far more to Noe's story than even a talented writer like Maine could tell in a dozen novels [...].

(Source: ↗Time)

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The interaction between God and man is the oldest in literature, from the myths of ancient Greece, to the scriptures of Hinduism, the written word seems to have been created for the sole purpose of discussing our position in the realm of the metaphysical. In recent centuries the shift has been to the mundane and all things spiritual one can find in life itself. Main is one of those writers who seek to combine the two, the ancient and religious with the post modern accent on life itself. The early stories of the Old Testament are perfect for his task.

In his first novel, Maine takes up one of the most famous of these, that of Noah and his family. Within the Bible, the entire account, from introduction of his lineage to the recession of the water and expansion of his family takes no more than a couple of chapters. Maine takes those couple of chapters and blows them up into a fully realized, brilliantly characterized novel.

Not only does he manage to bring to life all of the ethos that a family forced to live as such would face, but also of the individual reactions and interactions, of Noah's sons and their wives, of the strict God fearing life he leads and the stress this puts on his family, but also of the pain he saves them through his sacrifices. His family's perspective is just as important though, from the youth of the youngest son to the weary devotion of his wife, Noah's tale is told again and again through a half dozen perspectives, each of them fresh in their own way and brought to life in Maine's special voice.

(Source: associatedcontent.com)

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