The Bonfire of the Vanities

Bonfire of the Vanities (AKA The Bonfire of the Vanities English, published in 1987 by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York), which is probably the most important and best-known work of the American writer Tom Wolfe. It first appeared from July 1984 to August 1985 as a serial novel in the Rolling Stone magazine. In 1990, the novel by Brian De Palma was filmed.

The title was Savonarola " falò delle vanità " borrowed; this was in Florence in the late 15th century building pyres on which he burned as vain and lewd viewed items he had had to collect from the public. Their owners should learn by purification.

The main characters

After a prologue, which describes how the New York mayor is shouted down by an angry crowd in Harlem, followed by the presentation of the acting persons.

Sherman McCoy is thirty-eight and earned as a broker on Wall Street millions with which he can afford an apartment in the exquisite Park Avenue and own service personnel. His father is also wealthy, but has style, which completely lacks the nouveau riche Sherman - as well as his wife Judy, a hysterical climber from the middle class of the Midwest, which distributes her time as an interior designer and spends her husband's money for expensive interior. The spoiled daughter of Campbell attends an exclusive private school. McCoy is the prototype of the elitist WASP, he has a noble Yale chin, which is the symbol for his arrogant demeanor.

The Jewish underground Attorney Larry Kramer is frustrated over almost all aspects of his life: that his formerly attractive woman Rhonda gradually developed into a shtetl Mama, that the birth of his son crosses his fitness training and so binds him forever to his family, as Kramer fears, with the disappearance of his muscle bulk also wane his attraction to other women; and finally that he earns less than his colleagues, not to mention his former fellow students at New York's Columbia University, one of which has already become a partner in a large law firm.

The British journalist Peter Fallow is not just successful at the ( fictional) New York tabloid The City Light. His motivation for his profession has already been lost, and now he mainly deals with extending the charges for its products as far as possible and to sneak in invitations, free meals, which prepares him special pleasure, because he detests the Americans.

The plot

Sherman McCoy keeps a mistress from the South, which he picks up one evening by car from the airport. He lost his way with her in the Bronx, where the two two blacks encounter; because they feel threatened by them, they drive rashly thereof, wherein one of the blacks of McCoy's lover who drives his Mercedes, is approached. Sherman problems accumulate in the next chapters, as his wife finds out first that he cheating on her, and then he messes up a multi-million dollar securities business.

Meanwhile, the young black man who was hit, fell into a coma, and Reverend Bacon, a power-hungry and manipulative, supposedly a good guy and preacher from Harlem, makes the case with the help of Peter Fallow, who hopes to revive his career to a political. Fallows history is brought out great in his newspaper because the owner is impressed by the exaggerated depictions of the ghetto. Shortly thereafter, succeeds two Irish policemen McCoy, whose alleged self-confidence collapses under their interrogation to identify as driver of the car.

The case will now be handed over to Larry Kramer, wants what to do with this case career - his ambitious boss Abe Weiss fears for his re-election as district attorney, if he by a too lax prosecution of the case at the black majority in his district ( the Bronx ) in discredit device, since it is as white and Jew anyway not very popular. Through a deliberate indiscretion comes McCoy's name to the public, and by the sensationalist media, he is immediately prejudiced. Civil rights protest outside his posh apartment while Kramer McCoy's mistress persuaded to testify against him to himself impunity assumed. McCoy is arrested and brought to his horror, along with some common criminals on the main guard of the Bronx until the deposit is paid.

Now he strikes back: On the advice of a lawyer engaged by him he has wired up with his lover and can, although they discovered the bug, provide evidence that Kramer has influenced them. The tape is finally played in court, and Kramer, who must listen, as referred to him as McCoy's mistress inflated little bastard loses the case. McCoy, however, like an epilogue in the form of a fictional article in the New York Times reported a year later charged again because the black one is now dead; Kramer is now discredited, since his affair has come to light with a jury, and Fallow has made a career while McCoy is divorced from his wife and has virtually lost through the court processes all his property.

Style viewing

Bonfire of the Vanities is despite its epic proportions in large part of dialogue and inner monologues and is held in a partially journalistic -style realism. The whole text is satirical throughout, and Wolfe has his characters with an ironic distance to go to ruin; cynical, however, the triumph seems to those who draw their benefits from the witch-hunt against McCoy. The talks are like logs and partly onomatopoeic reproduced, the most different jargons are evidence of wolf accurate observation; foggeddaboudafuckingshit the slang of the police and prosecutors is also parodied as the language of lawyers, stockbrokers, politicians and the ghetto idiom of blacks and the southern style pronunciation McCoy's lover.

Filming

In 1990 the book by Brian DePalma was filmed, the role of Sherman McCoy was played by Tom Hanks and the role of Peter Fallow by Bruce Willis.