Product Description

In The Marquise of O-, a virtuous widow finds herself unaccountably pregnant. And although the baffled Marquise has no idea when this happened, she must prove her innocence to her doubting family and discover whether the perpetrator is an assailant or lover. Michael Kohlhaas depicts an honourable man who feels compelled to violate the law in his search for justice, while other tales explore the singular realm of the uncanny, such as The Beggarwoman of Locarno, in which an old woman’s ghost drives a heartless nobleman to madness, and St Cecilia, which portrays four brothers possessed by an uncontrollable religious mania. The stories collected in this volume reflect the preoccupations of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) with the deceptiveness of human nature and the unpredictability of the physical world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49294 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-25
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Heinrich von Kleist, born in 1777, came of an old Prussian military family, but disliked military life and resigned his commission in 1799 to devote himself to studious pursuits. He turned to creative writing in 1801, and during the next ten years created some of the most remarkable plays in German literature. Kleist had an unstable and almost schizophrenic personality and his works relect his passionately uncompromising nature and his periodic fits of wild enthusiasm and morose melancholia. He committed suicide in 1811. David Luke is an Emeritus Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, where he was Tutor in German until 1988. He has published articles and essays on German literature. His translation of Faust Part One was awarded the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1989. Nigel Reeves was Alexander von Humbolt Fellow at the University of Tubingen and from 1975 to 1990 was Professor of German at the University of Surrey. He is currently Professor of German at Aston University.

Customer Reviews

Disturbing
The Wikipedia entry on Kleist describes Kleist's philosophy as "the ironic rebuff of all theories of human perfection". Michael Kolhaas shows its eponymous hero having to resort to criminality in his attempts to achieve 'justice'. A thesis as absurd as it is pertinent. While Kleist's tales are intentionally disturbing they manage also (speaking personally) to be hilarious - a reminder of how closely comedy feeds off of disaster, fear, paradox and chaos. His fiction - which is far from inaccessible - deserves to be far better known.

'The Tales'
"The world of all these stories is an unpridictable one, a world of dislocated casuality on which inexplicable factors intrude and in which sanity is poised on the brink of destruction. They are the work of a rationalist tormented by his loss of faith in Reason and desparately searching for certainity, for an order which is not 'gebrechlich'. In Kliest's life this search could only fail; the only imposable order was that of his art, an order of words, the strange patterns of his three or four dramatic masterpieces, the electrifiying articulated structures of his narrative prose.."

You can tell from reading these stories that they have been translated to english as best as is possible ( although the translators say it still doest do it absolute justice ) and from reading the dense introduction that the translators know what there talking about. Although they are all written to the same incredible standard, my personal favorite has to be The Power of Music, although i cant properly put into words why, such is its subtility of context ( maybe when im more experienced il beable to do justice to it ) but put bluntly its to show the Christian's lack of understanding of the term 'natural causes', and it does this amazingly to the extent that it could be interpreted either way almost equally. A close second would be The Founderling and the Betrothal of Santo Domingo, then Micheal Kohlass.
The only problem i have with the book is its title and cover, they should have published this collection of stories under the title in which Kliest published them, 'The Tales'; it could then have a much nice look. All in all i highly recomend it, theres probably no story writer as intense and masterly as Kliest.