"The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels."nSo says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Son of the Circus and A Prayer for Owen Meany.n"Like Garp, [THE HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE] is a startlingly original family saga that combines macabre humor with Dickensian sentiment and outrage at cruelty, dogmatism and injustice."n--Timen"Rejoice! John Irving has written another book according to your world....You must read this book."n--Los Angeles Timesn"Spellbinding...Intensely human...A high-wire act of dazzling virtuosity."n--Cosmopolitan
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERnn"Like Garp ...a startlingly original family saga that combines macabre humor with a Dickensian sentiment and outrage at cruelty, dogmatism and injustice." Timenn"Rejoice! John Irving has written another book according to your world.... You must read this book." Los Angeles Timesnn"Spellbinding.... Intensely human.... A high-wire act of dazzling virtuosity." CosmopolitannnFrom the Trade Paperback edition.
John (Winslow) Irving, geboren am 2. März 1942 in Exeter, im Staat New Hampshire, als ältestes von vier Kindern. John Irvings Vater war Lehrer und Spezialist für russische Geschichte und Literatur. Seine Kindheit verbrachte Irving in Neuengland. 1957 begann er mit dem Ringen; 19jährig wusste Irving, was er werden wollte: Ringer und Romancier. Studium der englischen Literatur an den Universitäten von New Hampshire und Iowa, wo er später Gastdozent des Schriftsteller-Workshops war. Deutschkurs in Harvard. 1963-1964 Aufenthalt in Wien. 1964 Rückkehr in die Vereinigten Staaten. Arbeit als Lehrer an Schule und Universität bis 1979. Lebt heute in Toronto und im südlichen Vermont. 1992 wurde Irving in die National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, aufgenommen, 2000 erhielt er einen Oscar für die beste Drehbuchadaption für seinen von Lasse Hallström verfilmten Roman Gottes Werk und Teufels Beitrag.
Chapter One - The Bear Called State O'MainennThe summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born - we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. My father and mother were hometown kids who knew each other all their lives, but their "union," as Frank always called it, hadn't taken place when Father bought the bear.nn"Their 'union,' Frank?" Franny used to tease him; although Frank was the oldest, he seemed younger than Franny, to me, and Franny always treated him as if he were a baby. "What you mean, Frank," Franny said, "is that they hadn't started screwing."nn"They hadn't consummated their relationship," said Lilly, one time; although she was younger than any of us, except Egg, Lilly behaved as if she were everyone's older sister-a habit Franny found irritating.nn" ' Consummated'?" Franny said. I don't remember how old Franny was at the time, but Egg was not old enough to hear talk like this: "Mother and Father simply didn't discover sex until after the old man got that bear," Franny said. "That bear gave them the idea - he was such a gross, horny animal, humping trees and playing with himself and trying to rape dogs."nn"He mauled an occasional dog," Frank said, with disgust. "He didn't rape dogs."nn"He tried to," Franny said. "You know the story."nn"Father's story," Lilly would then say, with a disgust slightly different from Frank's disgust; it was Franny Frank was disgusted with, but Lilly was disgusted with Father.nnAnd so it's up to me - the middle child, and the least opinionated - to set the record straight, or nearly straight. We were a family whose favorite story was the story of my mother and father's romance: how Father bought the bear, how Mother and Father fell in love and had, in rapid succession, Frank, Franny, and me ("Bang, Bang, Bang!" as Franny would say); and, after a brief rest, how they then had Lilly and Egg ("Pop and Fizzle," Franny says). The story we were told as children, and retold to each other when we were growing up, tends to focus on those years we couldn't have known about and can see now only in those years more clearly than I see them in the years I actually can remember, because those times I was present, of course, are colored by the fact that they were up-and-down times - about which I have up-and-down opinions. Toward the infamous summer of the bear, and the magic of my mother and father's courtship, I can allow myself a more consistent point of view.nnWhen Father would stumble in telling us the story - when he would contradict an earlier version, or leave out our favorite parts of the tale - we would shriek at him like violent birds.n"Either you're lying now or you lied the last time," Franny (always the harshest of us) would tell him, but Father would shake his head, innocently.nn"Don't you understand?" he would ask us. "You imagine the story better than I remember it."nn"Go get Mother," Franny would order me, shoving me off the couch. Or else Frank would lift Lilly off his lap and whisper to her, "Go get Mother." And our mother would be summoned as witness to the story we suspected Father of fabricating.nn"Or else you're leaving out the juicy parts on purpose," Franny would accuse him, "just because you think Lilly and Egg are too young to hear about all the screwing around."nn"There was no screwing around," Mother would say. "There was not the promiscuity and freedom there is today. If a girl went off and spent the night or weekend with someone, even her peers thought her a tramp or worse; we really didn't pay much attention to a girl after that. 'Her kind sticks together,' we used to say. And 'Water seeks its own level.'" And Franny, whether she was eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-five, would always roll her eyes and elbow me, or tickle me, and whenever I tickled her back she'd holler, "Pe