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MICHAEL KOHLHAAS

Name: MICHAEL KOHLHAAS
Author: Heinrich Von Kleist
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2834-3

by Heinrich Von Kleist ; translated by Michael Hofmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2020

A masterwork that, 220 years on, holds up well thanks to this fluent translation.

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Foundational novella of the German romantic era, celebrating a folk hero of the 1530s.

First published in 1810, the year before von Kleist committed suicide at 34, this short, elegant novel is well known to students of German literature. It’s easy to see why Franz Kafka should have esteemed it so much, drawing on it for books like The Castle and The Trial: The hero of the piece is a law-abiding man who confronts an obdurate bureaucracy and loses—though not without a fight, for, as von Kleist writes, “his sense of justice led him to robbery and murder.” The eponymous horse trader travels a well-worn path to market only to find a new tollbooth blocking his way. It seems that Wenzel von Tronka, heir to the newly deceased lord of the territory, is exercising his royal privilege to issue visas to cross it for a fee, and although Kohlhaas protests that “he had passed this frontier seventeen times in the course of his life without any such document,” he is forced to leave two horses from his string as security. Arriving in Dresden, the regional capital, Kohlhaas learns both that this demand for collateral was imposed arbitrarily and that his captive horses have been ill treated, though the lawsuit he files is eventually dismissed as a “baseless fuss” thanks to von Tronka’s influence. That’s reason enough for him to become a fierce avenger who sets out in fury to reclaim what’s his—and, in the orderly realm of the Electorate of Saxony, such outlaw acts, no matter how well justified, are enough to earn a person a death penalty. Von Kleist complicates the story, which he relates as a matter-of-fact chronicle, with a few neat twists toward the end, quietly satirizing both the legal system and the imperial order of his day while suggesting that the quest for justice is more likely to backfire on the petitioner than be rewarded with anything other than “near-universal mourning.”

A masterwork that, 220 years on, holds up well thanks to this fluent translation.

Pub Date: March 31, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2834-3

Page Count: 144

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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OF MICE AND MEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

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Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.