Synopses & Reviews
“Kleist’s narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as historical—even in his day nobody wrote as he did...An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences painfully soldered together...and driven by a breathless tempo.”—Thomas Mann
Peter Wortsman captures the breathlessness and power of Heinrich von Kleist’s transcendent prose. These moral tales move across inner landscapes, exploring the bridges between reason and feeling and the frontiers between the human psyche and the divine.
The concerns of Heinrich von Kleist are timeless. The mysteries in his fiction and visionary essays still breathe.
Review
"Kleists narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as historicaleven in his day nobody wrote as he did. . . . An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences painfully soldered together. . . and driven by a breathless tempo."
Thomas Mann
"What makes Kleist truly 'modern' is his insistence on the aesthetic significance of the world around which we must journey."
Paul Bishop, Journal of European Studies
"As a storyteller he ranks most naturally with Kafka, who admired him and learned from him."
Sigurd Burckhardt, The Hudson Review
"Kleist left behind a corpus of works that, while small in quantity, were and still are among the finest German texts."
Library Journal
"Michael Kohlhaas
a story I read with true reverence."
Franz Kafka
"This collection of short stories, novellas and literary fragments
is impressive not only for its content but for its relevance centuries later.
A dark, charming collection of twisted fairy tales for grownups."
Publishers Weekly
"Dazzling.
Mesmeriz[ing].
A collection of superbly crafted stories and essays that span cultures and centuries but deftly exposes the universality of human tragedy."
Three Percent
"Exploiting to the full the rigors of German syntax, he uses language to impose order and meaning on a profoundly disordered world. Clause follows clause in a stately, dispassionate procession of appalling events, commas marking time, paragraphs and even single sentences stretching on inexorably for line after line. Catastrophes unfold in a subclause. Idiosyncrasies of word order defer full, terrible understanding to the last possible moment."
Ian Brunskill, The Wall Street Journal
"The stories do not pause for breath; even less so in Wortsman's translations, which seek to convey the intricately enmeshed patterns of Kleist's syntax, so that, for example, the hundred or so pages of Michael Kohlhaas seem almost a single sentence. Once one engages with Kleist's narration, its peculiar urgency forces attention even as the plot spins into unforeseen byways."
Geoffrey O'Brien, Bookforum
"A gift to fans of German literary history. . . . Wortsman preserves much of Kleist's difficult sentence structures and punctuation, and succeeds at modernizing Kleist's sometimes antiquarian prose. The selection is streamlined, yet carefully balanced, thus giving readers all of Kleist's necessary lunacy and narrative brilliance."
Christopher M. Ohge, The World
Synopsis
Searing searching tales of moral crises and faith. Kleist is a sculptor of delirium.
About the Author
Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), one of Germanys most enigmatic and celebrated authors, was an aristocrat by birth, a rebel by inclination, a Romantic by temperament, and a stylist of uncompromising rigor whose writings in multiple modes, including drama, fiction, and expository prose, have grown all the more pertinent over time. Kleist lived a restless, roving life, serving stints as a soldier, a bureaucrat, a prisoner, and an unsuccessful newspaper editor. Finding himself in financial straits and personal despair, Kleist, together with his terminally ill lover, committed suicide near the Wannsee in Berlin in 1811. Recipient of the 2012 Gold Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of the Year, Peter Wortsman is the author of A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales, the plays The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words, the recent memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, and the forthcoming novel Cold Earth Wanderers. His translations from the German include Robert Musil¢s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Heinrich Heine¢s Travel Pictures, Peter Altenberg¢s Telegrams of the Soul, and Tales of the German Imagination: From The Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, an anthology published by Penguin Classics.