The Rider on the White Horse: And selected stories

by Theodor Storm

Paperback, 1964

Status

Available

Call number

833.7

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Signet / New American Library (1964), Paperback, 285 pages

Description

“The Rider on the White Horse” begins as a ghost story. A traveler along the coast of the North Sea is caught in dangerously rough weather. Offshore he glimpses a spectral rider rising and plunging in the wind and rain. Taking shelter at an inn, the traveler mentions the apparition, and the local schoolmaster volunteers a story. The story is both simple and subtle, and its peculiar power is to surprise us slowly. It is a story of determination, of a young man, Hauke Haien, living in a remote community (Storm depicts the village with the luminous precision of a Vermeer), who is out to make a name for himself and to remake his world. It is a story of devotion and disappointment, of pettiness and superstition, of spiritual pride and ultimate desolation, and of the beauty and indifference of the natural world. It is a story that opens up in the end to uncover the foundation of savagery on which human society rests. Theodor Storm’s great novella, which will remind readers of the work of Thomas Hardy, is one of the supreme masterpieces of German literature. It is here limpidly translated by the American poet James Wright, along with seven other shorter works, including the lyrical love story “Immensee.”… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member BayardUS

A potentially interesting book, but not that interesting in practice and not particularly enjoyable either. When reading his early stories it's clear that Storm had a very distinctive style, as the transitions between scenes and times have a dreamlike quality where you just barely manage to hold on

to how one passage flows into the next. While this quality is interesting in the abstract, Storm doesn't pair it with engaging stories so it's largely wasted. In general his style wasn't one I enjoyed, a problem magnified by the fact that Storm's stories are often overly reliant on coincidences (notably the stories "In Saint Jurgen" and "Aquis Submersus") and the characters are not distinctive. In most of the stories, even the titular story of The Rider on the White Horse that lasts a hundred pages, the main character is defined by a single quality or interest, or at most two. There are many characters who you can sum up as "man in love" or "woman in love" or "bad person keeping lovers apart." It's boring, and because of this the writing fails to make you empathize with the characters. Characters also make nonsensical decisions on occasion for the sake of whatever story Storm was trying to tell (a man marrying someone he doesn't love for no reason, a wife riding her carriage into the sea when she would have been perfectly safe at home, etc.). Storm also has the tendency to add a frame narrative to his story, as the main tale is often conveyed through a storyteller or old documents or something similar, but nothing is ever added to the story through this. It's the appearance of adding another layer to the meaning of the story without actually adding any depth.

Even the interesting style seemed to have gotten less pronounced in Storm's later stories, leaving some works in this collection that are entirely dull. There's nothing wrong or especially bad about any of the Storm stories included here, but they're all so unremarkable that I can't imagine myself ever recommending this author to anyone.

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