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Peak is the title of the novel, the name of the protagonist and also the setting: the peak, that is Mount Everest.
Smith has written a youth novel which starts off rather conventional: Peak is a bored genius climber, gets caught climbing the Woolworth Building in his hometown New York, is sentenced to a mild sentence under the condition that he leave the country the same day. He does leave and travels to China with his father who happens to be a world famous and commercially successful climber. The plan is for him to climb the Mount Everest as youngest person ever.
I am glad to report that not everything remains as perfect and sensationally good as it seems in the beginning. The father has ulterior and not entirely kosher motives (but they are not clearly evil either), Peak is confronted with ambiguous motives, characters and situations more than once and grows on them.
In the end he returns to New York just in time for his and his sisters’ birthday party.
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The Queen has turned to books, and the books, in turn, have got to the Queen. From a rather dull performer of duty she turns to a ferocious reader, avoiding, taking shortcuts or adapting her duties to accommodate for her reading. Obviously, Alan Bennett’s novel is highly fictional and certainly not really about the Queen.
Next to the Queen, kitchenboy, later page, than send-off to the University of East Anglia functions as counterpart to the Queen and second protagonist. He has always been reading and now gets a chance to introduce the Queen into the world of literature, quite often gay literature. While at the beginning the Queen lives the more worldly life, it is Norman who through books may know more about the world, even though he has not travelled very far. Through her reading, the Queem becomes more and worldly on the inside and finally feels that she may have overtaken her former tutor, who just then has been sent off to East Anglia by courtiers disliking the Queens reading habit. That the equerry and even the Prime Minister are afraid that reading may actually change the status quo is a quaint but unrealistic thought.
Finally, the Queen turns to writing herself. Interesting, because she who once had a very limited view of the world and only grew through reading now feels her voice needs to be heard and starts producing her own literature. Is this arrogance, because none of her fresh insights appear to have their source in herself but rather in other people’s books? Or is it a subtle comment on the power of reading that lies not merely in conveying new thoughts, but more importantly in drawing new ideas and insights from thoughts and experiences having lain dormant in the reader.
Be that as it may – this is a novel about reading, not about the Queen.
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Well, what indeed?
Genki Kawamura’s novel starts from the assumption that the devil makes a pact with a terminally ill person to prolong his life one day at a time, but that in return he must agree to erase one category of objects from the world forever. Per day.
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Afrikaanssprachige Literatur ist ein recht übersichtliches und zudem noch weitestgehend abgeschlossenes Sammelgebiet: Vor dem 20. Jahrhundert war Afrikaans als Schriftsprache noch nicht existent, nach dem Ende der Apartheid 1994 ließ und lässt die Bedeutung des Afrikaans – nach einem kurzen Strohfeuer von Aufarbeitungs-Literatur – rasch nach. Nennenswerte Literatur gibt es also nur aus dem 20. Jahrhundert. Trotz dieser besonderen Rahmenbedingungen hat auch die afrikaanse Literatur den einen oder anderen Autor von Weltrang hervorgebracht. Der eine ist Breyten Breytenbach, der andere André Brink.
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Method Guides und Ähnliches gibt es viele, und auch ich habe schon das eine oder andere Buch dieser Art rezensiert. Irgendwie sind die meisten dieser Bücher ok, und auch gegen das Schöningh-Werk kann man nicht viel sagen. Es werden eine ganze Reihe Methoden vorgestellt, die ganz übersichtlich angeordnet sind und sicher auch ganz nützlich für den Unterricht sind − und zwar nicht nur für den Englischunterricht wie im Untertitel beschrieben, sondern für fast jeden Unterricht (Mathe und Sport mal ausgenommen). Das bedeutet aber natürlich auch: Kein Mensch braucht für jedes seiner Fächer ein, womöglich mehrere Methodenhandbücher. Die Methoden stellen ganz überwiegend keine großen Überraschungen dar und der Überlapp z.B. mit den 55 Methoden für den Religionsunterricht ist ganz beträchtlich.
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