Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Signet / New American Library (1962), Paperback, 284 pages
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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member DieFledermaus
Most of the stories are fairly interesting for a variety of reasons. First though - 'The Betrothal in Santo Domingo' was really hard to read because of the excessive racism. Many 19th c. novels do include various racist/anti-Semitic etc. parts, but the whole story was white = good, black = bad.
The title story seems to beg a Freudian interpretation. The Marquise finds herself pregnant with no way to account for it. Readers know that she was raped by Count F, who she believes saved her from rampaging soldiers in an attack on their castle. The event, like names and places, is represented by a dash - as if the author is telling a true story but has to conceal facts for propriety. The dash allows for several interpretations - she was unconscious when it happened, she knew she was raped but is in denial, or she was a willing participant and in shame 'forgot' it. Her house is well guarded but when the Count returns, he enters in the back through an unlocked gate - Freudian unconscious desire? He also has a rather obvious dream of her as a swan that he throws mud at. Her relationship with her father - especially one slightly disturbing extended scene - has strong incestuous overtones. Despite all the drama, there's a -sort of?- happy ending.
'The Earthquake in Chile' is about the blindness of fate as lovers jailed for their affair, and about to be executed, are freed when the earthquake strikes. However, the aftermath brings goodwill and friendship as well as virulent hatred.
'Michael Kohlhaas' is the longest and starts when a happy, moral, well-off horse trader is tricked out of money, his horses abused and his groom injured by some minor gentry. His search for justice - which veers into violent revenge at points - makes up the rest of the story.
'The Duel' has a rather unusable moral - murderer Jakob Rotbart claims to have been with virtuous Littegarde, so her friend Friedrich fights a duel for her honor. Rotbart supposedly wins, but Friedrich heals from his major wounds while a small cut he made to Rotbart becomes life threatening. Since the duel is God's way of deciding who's right, Friedrich actually wins, but that can't always happen.
'The Foundling' is heavy on the melodrama has has seemingly supernatural events without actually having any (unlike the stories 'The Beggarwoman of Lacorno' and 'St Cecilia'). Nicolo is an orphan taken in by Piachi and his young wife Elvira. His similarity to a man from Elvira's past brings about confusion and opportunities for evil.
A diverse array of stories but they tend to be psychological and fantastic in nature.
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Black slaves are revolting on the island and portrayed as barbaric, as though violence never occurs anywhere else. The hideous leader of the revolt has a beautiful daughter - she's redeemable because she's only 1/16 black. She falls in love with a white man that her father is planning to kill and switches sides. The whites are, of course, all noble and when the man kills his fiancee but learns later that she didn't betray him, he commmits suicide. Good thing they didn't get married and go back to Europe - he'd probably end up ashamed of her and throw her over for someone else. The title story seems to beg a Freudian interpretation. The Marquise finds herself pregnant with no way to account for it. Readers know that she was raped by Count F, who she believes saved her from rampaging soldiers in an attack on their castle. The event, like names and places, is represented by a dash - as if the author is telling a true story but has to conceal facts for propriety. The dash allows for several interpretations - she was unconscious when it happened, she knew she was raped but is in denial, or she was a willing participant and in shame 'forgot' it. Her house is well guarded but when the Count returns, he enters in the back through an unlocked gate - Freudian unconscious desire? He also has a rather obvious dream of her as a swan that he throws mud at. Her relationship with her father - especially one slightly disturbing extended scene - has strong incestuous overtones. Despite all the drama, there's a -sort of?- happy ending.
'The Earthquake in Chile' is about the blindness of fate as lovers jailed for their affair, and about to be executed, are freed when the earthquake strikes. However, the aftermath brings goodwill and friendship as well as virulent hatred.
'Michael Kohlhaas' is the longest and starts when a happy, moral, well-off horse trader is tricked out of money, his horses abused and his groom injured by some minor gentry. His search for justice - which veers into violent revenge at points - makes up the rest of the story.
'The Duel' has a rather unusable moral - murderer Jakob Rotbart claims to have been with virtuous Littegarde, so her friend Friedrich fights a duel for her honor. Rotbart supposedly wins, but Friedrich heals from his major wounds while a small cut he made to Rotbart becomes life threatening. Since the duel is God's way of deciding who's right, Friedrich actually wins, but that can't always happen.
'The Foundling' is heavy on the melodrama has has seemingly supernatural events without actually having any (unlike the stories 'The Beggarwoman of Lacorno' and 'St Cecilia'). Nicolo is an orphan taken in by Piachi and his young wife Elvira. His similarity to a man from Elvira's past brings about confusion and opportunities for evil.
A diverse array of stories but they tend to be psychological and fantastic in nature.
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LibraryThing member Cygnus555
An indispensible book for people who like good writing. These stories are rollercoaster rides from the moment you start reading to the breathless ending. It stunned me that I could be so captured by writing from nearly 200 years ago! When I think of classics, I think of Dickens and other such dusty
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tomes that require significant effort to wade through! This Author recalibrated my sense of good writing. Show Less
LibraryThing member odrach
Heinrich von Keist (1777-1811) is a German writer of the early 19th century. He's not all that well known worldwide and even in Germany he remained a relative unkown for almost a century. His writing was so ahead of its time and he's been called the forerunner of modern drama. The Marquise of O is
In "The Foundling" Elvira renounces life by marrying an old man, Piachi. There are many secrets and it ends in catastrophe.
In the title story "Marquise of O." a widowed noblewoman becomes mysteriously pregnant, and she advertises in the newspapers for the unknown father. Though the premise is confusing, even disturbing, it starts so nonchalantly: "...a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-bred children, published the following notice in the newspapers: that, without her knowing how, she was in the family way; that she would like the father of the child she was going to bear to report himself ..."
These stories are excellent. Kleist is also known to have paved the way for Kafka, even though the two lived a century apart.
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a collection of short stories - the writing is quite abrupt, dry, and straighforward. It's also impersonal and almost intentionally anti-literary. It has such a contemporary feel to it.In "The Foundling" Elvira renounces life by marrying an old man, Piachi. There are many secrets and it ends in catastrophe.
In the title story "Marquise of O." a widowed noblewoman becomes mysteriously pregnant, and she advertises in the newspapers for the unknown father. Though the premise is confusing, even disturbing, it starts so nonchalantly: "...a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-bred children, published the following notice in the newspapers: that, without her knowing how, she was in the family way; that she would like the father of the child she was going to bear to report himself ..."
These stories are excellent. Kleist is also known to have paved the way for Kafka, even though the two lived a century apart.
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LibraryThing member MSarki
I loved this story as well as many others. A master storyteller of immense integrity.
LibraryThing member soylentgreen23
Kleist never really had the chance to become a great, great novelist; this collection shows what might have been had he lived longer, but in each story there is something that doesn't work. In some the idea is not fleshed out, in others, realising that his readers might be growing bored, Kleist
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inserts elements that are stubbornly incongruous. Show Less
LibraryThing member starbox
Kleist is a jolly good writer. "The Earthquake in Chile" was ..interesting. "The Marquise von O" was fractionally less so. I managed 80 pages of "Michael Kohlhaas"..but with another 20 ahead, I decided life is too short..and it's off to the charity shop.
Yes, I see the literary skills embodied by
But....
Yes, I see the literary skills embodied by
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Kleist's bleak look at life's vicissitudes.But....
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LibraryThing member proustitute
Irreligious, perverse, and shocking even to this day. Von Kleist's discontent with the social structures of his time—most especially the church, the law, and the vagaries of community life—makes his tales perhaps more politically rich than his contemporary Hoffmann, although both are equally
Von Kleist's style is very proto-modernist: his paragraphs run on for pages with no apparent reason for when they begin and when they end; his pacing is subjectively approached rather than objectively obsessed; and he often begins his stories by telling his reader the endings.
Absurdism runs rampant through these pieces. The title story involves a widowed Marquise who takes out an advertisement in the newspaper, searching for the man who apparently—although she has no memory of this—impregnated her. This kind of illogical and paradoxical situation is at the heart of most of von Kleist's work: "The Earthquake in Chile" turns an exiled pair of lovers into heroic figures in an apocalyptic setting ruled by no seeming authority; however, von Kleist seems to suggest that the imposing orders of the church and the law are so pervasive in their hold on mankind that mankind wreaks the same violence if left with no punitive action from high above.
This is also the case in "Michael Kohlhaas" where the protagonist takes the law into his own hands after repeated attempts to bring legal action against a man who is terrorizing the community. This kind of Kafkaesque critique of the law is also carried out to the extreme limits of surrealism, rendering reality as nightmarish in much the same way Kafka would do later. Of the shorter pieces collected here, "The Foundling" is the strongest and seems to speak to the same examination of reality versus fantasy in Hoffmann's "The Sandman." However, it is in the longer tales that von Kleist is able to enlarge his canvas and allow his oddly distorted syntax and phrasing to loop in and out of sense and nonsense most elegantly.
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skillful in plumbing the depths of the human psyche when it comes to matters of love, survival, family, and even gender.Von Kleist's style is very proto-modernist: his paragraphs run on for pages with no apparent reason for when they begin and when they end; his pacing is subjectively approached rather than objectively obsessed; and he often begins his stories by telling his reader the endings.
Absurdism runs rampant through these pieces. The title story involves a widowed Marquise who takes out an advertisement in the newspaper, searching for the man who apparently—although she has no memory of this—impregnated her. This kind of illogical and paradoxical situation is at the heart of most of von Kleist's work: "The Earthquake in Chile" turns an exiled pair of lovers into heroic figures in an apocalyptic setting ruled by no seeming authority; however, von Kleist seems to suggest that the imposing orders of the church and the law are so pervasive in their hold on mankind that mankind wreaks the same violence if left with no punitive action from high above.
This is also the case in "Michael Kohlhaas" where the protagonist takes the law into his own hands after repeated attempts to bring legal action against a man who is terrorizing the community. This kind of Kafkaesque critique of the law is also carried out to the extreme limits of surrealism, rendering reality as nightmarish in much the same way Kafka would do later. Of the shorter pieces collected here, "The Foundling" is the strongest and seems to speak to the same examination of reality versus fantasy in Hoffmann's "The Sandman." However, it is in the longer tales that von Kleist is able to enlarge his canvas and allow his oddly distorted syntax and phrasing to loop in and out of sense and nonsense most elegantly.
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LibraryThing member stephencbird
I read this book for the first time about 10 years ago; I remember having liked it, but not much else about it. However, Heinrich von Kleist's "The Marquise of O and Other Stories" impressed me enough for me to hold onto my paperback copy. Now having read this collection for the second time, I
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found all of these stories to be engaging and absorbing; consequentially, I have such renewed respect for this author -- Particularly for the compelling characters that people his work. Regarding Kleist's style: while humour can come into play in these tales [i.e. in "The Marquise of O"] Tragedy is obviously Kleist's forte -- It can be too much to bear. Heavy, harsh and shadowy reality abounds within this author's work; the author's style could be described as gothic [as in "The Beggarwoman of Locarno"]. Kleist's characters are inevitably cursed, or at the very least -- Frowned upon by fate. And if not that, then his evil-imbued antagonists prove to be too strong a match for those "good people" with whom they come into conflict [i.e. Count Jakob Rotbart of "The Duel" brings to mind Shakespeare's "Richard III"]. In "Michael Kohlhaas", the desire to be right / thirst for revenge, combined with bad luck / karma -- Turns the snowballing effects of Kohlhaas' self-sabotage into a fatal downward spiral. Finally, the story that proves to be the most heartbreaking is "The Betrothal of Domingo", which was written in 1811, the final year of Kleist's brief time on the planet; I believe that "The Betrothal of Domingo" actually foreshadows the murder-suicide pact with which Kleist ended his life. Show Less
Language
Original language
German
ISBN
none
Local notes
The Marquise of O-, Michael Kohlhaas, The Beggarwoman of Locarno, The Engagement in Santo Domingo, The Foundling, The Earthquake in Chile, St Cecilia or the Power of Music, The Duel