Synopses & Reviews
The novella was Schmidt's preferred form at the beginning of his writing career, and this volume collects the ten novellas he wrote between (1949) and (1957). The settings range from ancient Greece to 21st-Century America, but all react to the stifling conservatism and cold prudery of Adenauer Germany. Bursting with intellectual and sexual energies, resuscitating the German language after two decades of Nazi subjugation, these novellas revolutionized German literature in the 1950s and retain their power to shock and delight forty years later. Schmidt has been called a "giant of the modernist tradition, an enormously important talent in the fictional line of cruel comedy that runs from Rabelais through Swift and Joyce" (). This edition of his collected fiction should restore Schmidt to his rightful place at the forefront of 20th-century writing.
Review
" is an enticing introduction to the twisted mind games of Schmidt, to his unusual prose, his raving, voracious mind. While the themes and stories alone warrant hefty works ...more of fiction--war, devastation, love, art--it's the rambunctious style that brings these themes their power and their immediacy as well as their ability to capture, like Virginia Woolf, moments of being. Only Schmidt's moment is one of history's uglier, that of Nazi Germany, war on the western front, a POW camp, and postwar hypocrisy." Rain Taxi
Review
"Schmidt's writing often echoes Proust's hysterical empiricism or Joyce's manic wordplay, at times rivaling even ." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"With this opening volume of Schmidt's prose works in English, perhaps he will be recognized in this country for what he is: a truly innovative and witty writer." Chicago Tribune
Review
"Highly recommended." Library Journal
Review
"By a bitter bit of mistiming, Arno Schmidt, who died in 1979, has now become at least partly accessible in English . . . It's a shame that we are learning about his career only now when ...more it's over; all the more reason, then, to blow the untimely trumpet. He was a very good writer; we should have known his work sooner." New York Review of Books
Review
""When Arno Schmidt died, on Whit-Sunday 1979, modern German prose lost its greatest virtuoso . . . Reading Arno Schmidt can be addictive. I was first captivated by him in the late 1960s, and know no greater reading pleasure in the whole of postwar German literature." Times Literary Supplement
Review
"Schmidt defies translation. But here John E. Woods captures his very persona--and gleeful eroticism . . . Let us hope that . . . this new edition of the early works has the success it deserves . . . Then Arno Schmidt will assume his rightful place in modern literature." New York Times Book Review
Review
"The clown prince of contemporary German fiction, Arno Schmidt [was] a satirist who first wrote rather straight, pessimistic, intensely visual allegories of post-Nazi society, with ...more excursions into the time of Alexander the Great and A.D. 541, and then soared into tight, allusive wordplay that translates uncommonly well into English." Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
The early fiction of one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany, a man often called the German James Joyce due to the linguistic inventiveness of his fiction.
Synopsis
Collected Novellasis an enticing introduction to the twisted mind games of Schmidt, to his unusual prose, his raving, voracious mind. While the themes and stories alone warrant hefty works ...more of fiction--war, devastation, love, art--it's the rambunctious style that brings these themes their power and their immediacy as well as their ability to capture, like Virginia Woolf, moments of being. Only Schmidt's moment is one of history's uglier, that of Nazi Germany, war on the western front, a POW camp, and postwar hypocrisy.Schmidt's writing often echoes Proust's hysterical empiricism or Joyce's manic wordplay, at times rivaling even Finnegans Wake.With this opening volume of Schmidt's prose works in English, perhaps he will be recognized in this country for what he is: a truly innovative and witty writer.Highly recommended.By a bitter bit of mistiming, Arno Schmidt, who died in 1979, has now become at least partly accessible in English . . . It's a shame that we are learning about his career only now when ...more it's over; all the more reason, then, to blow the untimely trumpet. He was a very good writer; we should have known his work sooner."When Arno Schmidt died, on Whit-Sunday 1979, modern German prose lost its greatest virtuoso . . . Reading Arno Schmidt can be addictive. I was first captivated by him in the late 1960s, and know no greater reading pleasure in the whole of postwar German literature.Schmidt defies translation. But here John E. Woods captures his very persona--and gleeful eroticism . . . Let us hope that . . . this new edition of the early works has the success it deserves . . . Then Arno Schmidt will assume his rightful place in modern literature.The clown prince of contemporary German fiction, Arno Schmidt [was] a satirist who first wrote rather straight, pessimistic, intensely visual allegories of post-Nazi society, with ...more excursions into the time of Alexander the Great and A.D. 541, and then soared into tight, allusive wordplay that translates uncommonly well into English.
About the Author
Arno Schmidt was born in 1914, in the working-class suburb of Hamburg-Hamm, Germany. Drafted into the army in 1940, he served in the artillery at a flak base in Norway until the end of the war. After being held as a prisoner of war for eight months, he worked briefly as an interpreter for the British military police. His home in Lauban and, more importantly for him, his library had been lost in the war, and he and his wife were officially classified as Displaced Persons. In 1946 they found refuge in a one-room apartment in Cordingen in Lower Saxony. In 1958 Schmidt moved to the village of Bargfeld near Celle. Over the next 20 years, until his death in 1979, he wrote some of the landmarks of postwar German literature.John E. Woods won both the 1981 American Book Award and PEN award for his translation of Schmidt's Evening Edged in Gold and has published a new translation of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.