The Beach, neu gelesen

John Niven hat Alex Garlands The Beach (der Roman ist vor 20 Jahren, also 1996, erschienen) neu gelesen und stellt sich die Frage: Does it still thrill?

It is at once easy and almost impossible to imagine the novel recast now, for the millennials, the children of the characters Garland wrote about two decades ago. Easy because, instead of looking at the sunsets and jungle outlines through the prism of Vietnam movies, instead of looking up from their Game Boys […] towards the sparkling water, they would be looking up from iPhones and laptops, they would be filtering their reality […] through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

What will the generation that reads the novel now, and those that come after them, find in its pages? […] They will find what generations before them found […]: characters damaged by where they have come from, looking for release – or correction, or illumination – in strange new corners of the world and finding only disaffection, ugliness, self-absorption and ego.

Finding only the things they have brought with them.

Alex Garland’s cult novel The Beach, 20 years on – John Niven/The Guardian

Heute noch lesenswert.

The Beach, gut kommentiert

…und unmittelbar nach dem Artikel von John Niven ein wirklich guter Kommentar eines/r unbekannten Users/in:

Travelling today is different, exploring and finding yourself in remote places is different. Travel in yesteryear had no phone or internet connection to home or friends. You were on your own, expensive telephone calls home were a luxury seldom afforded, you found out who you were, just you, you made other travelling friends, you had to embrace and be involved with local culture, you considered yourself a diplomat for your country. You did more had more experiences that enriched your character, self reliance and so on… I spent two years travelling and working, it changed me totally on every level. Travelling today is different, you’re not on your own. Days of watching sunsets so beautiful, odd knowing that nobody where you came from would ever see what you had seen, the solitude, beautiful solitude. Returning home was alien and it took years to to become part of my home country culture again. Alex Garland’s book […] was a last gasp of what travelling was… it was adventure of self discovery without the gadgets of the 21st century… it was…freedom… true freedom… at a young age… from your own culture…

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