45. “Racconti Fantastici” by E.T.A. Hoffmann

Year of first publication: 1816
Genre: fantasy, horror, gothic
Country: Germany

In English the two short stories contained in this book are called “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” and “The Sandman”. You can read them on-line (click on the links provided).

*SPOILERS*

Plots: In the first story, “A New Year’s Eve Adventure”, we are told from the preface that the story will deal with the confusion between interior life and external world, in other words between reality and a magic world that might or might not be only in our minds. There are three narrators in the story: a first narrator-editor who introduces a second narrator, who introduces a third narrator. It is the second narrator who tells us of how he saw again the love of his life, Julie, who’s married with a hideous man (Hoffmann himself had a love story with a woman called Julie and had a fight with her husband). Then, the third narrator tells his story of how he fell in love with a woman named Giulietta, until the second narrator (and the reader) can no longer distinguish Julie from Giulietta. The second story starts with a young man, Nathanael, writing a letter to her sister’s fiancé about a man his parents called “the sandman”, who would tear off children’s eyes if they would not go to bed on time. Nathanael associated “the sandman” with a mysterious man called Coppelius who used to visit his parents’ home and in the presence of whom his father died. At first he’s convinced that Coppelius and a salesman who recently knocked at his door are the same person, but after a while he changes his mind. The salesman, an Italian called Coppola, is an alchemist and a friend of professor Spalanzani, who lives in front of Nathanael. The young man falls in love with Spalanzani’s daughter, Olympia, a very beautiful girl who’s absolutely delicious but seems to be very cold (at touch and sentiments). One day, when he’s about to propose to Olympia, he finds her father and Coppola fighting over her body, in reality just an automaton built by the alchemist.

Some thoughts: Two very strange short stories, certainly disquieting. They remind me of Gogol (“The Nose” or “The Overcoat”) and Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita), but also of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Sigmund Freud (who was not even born at the time these stories were written, I know). “A New Year's Eve Adventure” has a lot to do with the devil and with sin (the protagonist commits adultery and he’s subsequently punished). Morality is certainly what prompts the author to write the story, but there’s something more. Temptation is the real topic in the story: anything related to that apple in the garden of Eden would have been fine, I think.
“The Sandman” is one of Hoffman’s most famous stories (in fact, it was adapted many times in many different ways, as an operetta or as a feature film, for instance). It is very mysterious and enigmatic: it could be interpreted as the protagonist’s hallucination and inability to distinguish reality from fantasy - in the style of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw – or as a horror story – in the style of Frankenstein. Considering the dates (Frankenstein was published in 1818, The Turn of the Screw in 1898 and this story around 1816) and the fact that Hoffmann is considered a master of gothic literature, I would be in favour of the second interpretation, that is to say of the supernatural story.
It is quite curious that in both stories Italy is the country of sexual temptation and black magic: Giulietta asks her German lover for his reflection on the mirror, implicitly selling his soul to the devil, and the alchemist from the second story is an Italian. I think that, at the time, Italy was seen as a country with fewer restrictions on sexual life and vices more in general (wine, food, “la dolce vita” etc). Why this is represented as evil I would like to ask Mr Hoffmann (were he alive!). Another important theme in the stories is the confusion/opposition between a real world and a supernatural world. Women are immune to the fantastical and the horror: they are either down-to-earth, celestial creatures like Nathanael’s sister Clara, or she-devils who drive men to sin, like Giulietta or Olympia.
Usually I don’t like horror and I haven’t read much gothic fiction - not even Frankenstein or Poe, I must admit – but these stories were interesting (I could not use the word beautiful, because they are not certainly that). It’s not enough to say if I like E.T.A. Hoffmann or not, nonetheless. I know a lot of people like him, though.

About the author: E.T.A. Hoffmann was born in 1776 in Königsberg, then Prussia. His parents separated when he was very young and he grew up with his mother and maternal relatives. He particularly loved his aunt Charlotte, whom he nicknamed “Tante Füßchen”. Although she died when he was three years old, he treasured her memory and embroidered stories about her. He had a talent for music and began composing quite soon. He lived in both Prussia (now Germany) and Prussian Poland. He particularly enjoyed life in Warsaw, assimilating well with Polish society, but was forced to move to Berlin when Napoleon troops captured Warsaw. He is famous both as a composer and as a writer of fantastical stories which border with horror.

Herta Müller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature

As I did last year, when French author Le Clézio won the Prize, I scratched my head and said: “Uh?”. While all the world is congratulating the President of the United States of America for being awarded, quite unexpectedly, the Nobel Prize for Peace, yet another time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been won by a not-exactly-well-known author, Herta Müller.

So I read something about her life and works and surfed the web for some reactions to the prize. Here’s what I found out:

Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, only the 12th woman to win the prize in 108 years. Some people have ironically noticed that she fits into the criteria chosen by the Nobel Prize judges: she comes from a bicultural/ethnic minority background and she often writes about hard life in a totalitarian regime. Many think that recently the Nobel Prize for Literature seems to put political considerations ahead of literary merit. The criticism comes from the observation that many recent laureates are from ethnic or linguistic minorities (Le Clézio, Jelinek, Kertész, Gao and Szymborska) and therefore write about the political or social oppression that comes from this condition.

Herta Müller was born in the once Austro-Hungarian province of Banat, now part of Romania, and is therefore a part of the German minority of Romania. She writes, of course, about Ceauşescu’s communist regime: Herta Müller was in fact dismissed from her job because she didn’t want to cooperate with the Romanian secret police, moving to Germany in 1987 as a result of threats by the communists. The traumas of being in exile in her own country, Romania, and of being a minority in an oppressive communist regime have great influence on her works.

Unfortunately, only five of her works are translated into English and even in Germany she is not well known. Her masterpiece is considered to be Herztier, published in English as The Land of Green Plums: in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign, several young people leave the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects, but they must face betrayal, suicide, and the reality that even the strongest must bend to the oppressors or resist and die. Other important works are The Appointment, about a young woman working in a clothes factory during Ceausescu's regime and The Passport (here’s a link with an extract), the story of a village miller in a German-speaking village in Romania, who applies for permission to emigrate to West Germany.

Reading the reactions to this award, I gather that everybody who has read her books agree that she is an exceptional writer, but the point of debate is more the meaning of this prize for the literary world, as if the commettee was trying to send a message. Similar polemics and observations arouse last year when JMG Le Clézio, also little known outside of France, won the prize (here’s a link to my post on the topic).

The Guardian reports that “Pete Ayrton, who has published Müller in translation at Serpent's Tail, said he was ‘absolutely thrilled’ at the news. "It's terrific and I think it shows the Nobel prize are doing their job to bring the writings of wonderful, neglected writers, who are underappreciated in the Anglo Saxon world, to our attention" he said.”

Two book bloggers, also of The Guardian, reflect on the award. Marting Chalmers in “Why Herta Müller Matters” writes: “It is once again challenging the self-satisfied Anglo-centrism of the English-language publishing business, with its rather narrow definitions of what constitutes good writing, and it is widening our ideas of Europe. And it is perhaps in its failure to engage with European literatures that the English culture, for all the advantages of the global reach of the English language, shows itself at its most provincial.”

It is very selfish and imperialistic to think that the judges were thinking of sending a message only to the Anglo Saxon book business, rather than to the whole literary world. Richard Lea is less "anglocentric" and, even admitting that he’s not an expert on Ngugi Wa Thiong’o or any other non-European writer, he thinks that the Swedish Committee is “running a European Club” and actually, if you read the list of recent winners, you only find writers who are not that far away from Sweden: JMG Le Clézio (France), Harold Pinter (England), Orhan Pamuk (Turkey, almost Europe), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria), Imre Kertész (Hungary) and Günter Grass (Germany).

Memole says: I don't know what to think. It's good that they are encouraging European literatures and that they don't stick to British/American authors, but it's also true that they could open their minds and give the award to an Asian or African writer, there are so many. On the other hand, I'm afraid that in 20 years' time we will be musing over the fact that Philip Roth or Amos Oz didn't receive the prize (the writer must be alive to be eligible), as we do now with Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. It seems to me that the judges decided to award the prize to a writer who's from an ethnic or linguistic minority, who suffered the injusticies of Nazism or Communism or any other dictatorship, fought against it and wrote about it, who's European but not British, better if from the new members of the European Union, who's a woman, who's not translated enought into English... and only after that agreed that the only writer who answers these characteristics is Herta Müller.

Here's a link to an article of the New York Times with more excerpts from Herta Müller's works.

L’unico suo libro disponibile in italiano è Il Paese delle Prugne Verdi. Sono stati pubblicati altri due dei suoi libri: Bassure, nel 1987, e In Viaggio Su Una Gamba Sola, nel 1992, entrambi ora fuori catalogo. Lei era anche presente al Festivaletteratura di Mantova (qui un link ad un articolo tratto da Il Corriere della Sera).

20. “La Morte a Venezia” di Thomas Mann

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 1912
Genere: romanzo breve
Paese: Germania / Italia

Sull’autore: Thomas Mann nacque a Lubecca, in Germania, nel 1875. Si dedica fin da giovanissimo al giornalismo e alla letteratura, come il fratello maggiore Heinrich. Lavora per un breve periodo in una compagnia di assicurazioni e poi decide di dedicarsi a tempo pieno alla letteratura. Durante un soggiorno in Italia comincia a lavorare al suo romanzo più famoso, I Buddenbrook (1901). Fanno seguito alcuni racconti novelle, tra cui Tonio Kroeger (1903) e La Morte a Venezia (1912), e poi un altro romanzo, La Montagna Incantata (1924). Nel 1929 gli viene conferito il Premio Nobel per la Letteratura e nel 1933, con l’arrivo del nazismo in Germania, si trasferisce prima in Svizzera e poi negli Stati Uniti.

Trama: Un famoso scrittore decide di prendersi una vacanza. Dopo un paio di tentativi falliti, capisce che la destinazione ideale è Venezia, così decide di prendere una camera in un hotel del Lido. Tra i vari soggiornanti dell’albergo c’è un giovane ragazzo polacco dalla bellezza impressionante di cui lo scrittore s’invaghisce senza azzardarsi a rivolgergli la parola.

Alcuni pensieri: Sapevo che iniziando questo breve libro avrei incontrato Venezia e non la Venezia allegra delle calli rumorose e delle serate in campo che piace a me, ma una Venezia tetra e cupa dove regnano la peste e i cattivi odori. Sapevo che iniziando questo breve libro avrei incontrato la morte alquanto insensata di uno scrittore per un’ossessione assurda, quella per un ragazzo con il quale non ha mai scambiato una sola parola e di cui non sa niente se non il nome. Ma non sapevo che avrei incontrato un alone di mistero che ricopre tutta Venezia, le sue chiese barocche e il suo fascino decadente. Misteriosa è la fascinazione di Gustav von Aschenbach per il bellissimo adolescente Tadzio, un episodio di velata omosessualità e pedofilia ma descritto in modo innocente e naturale. La passione dello scrittore è quella che si prova di fronte ad un’opera d’arte o alla bellezza più pura della natura. La situazione in cui si trova invischiato Aschenbach rispecchia un’esperienza di Mann a Venezia raccontata dalla moglie dello scrittore (che non era né omosessuale né pedofilo). Mann era rimasto affascinato da un ragazzino molto attraente, ma non si era spinto fino al punto di inseguirlo per tutta Venezia. Ho visto anche il film di Luchino Visconti degli anni ’70, ugualmente misterioso, triste e cupo. Si tratta davvero di un racconto particolare, ma che in fondo, se ci si pensa bene, mette insieme eros e thanatos, l’amore e la morte, come in tante altre opere d’arte (mi viene in mente Baudelaire, ma si potrebbero citare decine di autori).