Motley Stones (New York Review Books Classics)

"It was once said against me that I fashion only small things, and that my people are always ordinary people. If that is true, I am now in the position of offering readers something smaller and more insignificant still, namely an assortment of fancies for young hearts. Nor are they even meant to preach virtue and morals, as the custom is, but rather to work solely by what they are. If there is anything noble and good in me, it will exist in my writings on its own; but if it is not in my nature, I will strive in vain to depict the sublime and the beautiful, for baseness and ignobility will always show through. Fashioning great or small things was never the aim of my writings; I was guided by other laws entirely. Art is so high and exalted for me; for me, as I have said elsewhere, it is the highest thing on earth after religion, and so I have never regarded my writings as poetical, nor shall I presume to regard them so. The world has but a very few poets, who are the high priests, the benefactors of humanity; but it has a great many false prophets. Yet if not all spoken words can be poetry, they may be something else whose existence is not utterly unjustified. To give kindred spirits an hour of pleasure, to send forth greetings to all of them known or unknown, and add a grain of good to the edifice of the eternal, that was my writings' aim, and that it shall remain. I would be very glad to know for certain that I had achieved even this aim alone"-- Provided by publisher Zusammenfassung: "The first complete English translation of the nineteenth-century Austrian innovator's evocative, elemental cycle of novellas. For Kafka he was my fat brother ; Thomas Mann called him one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature. Often misunderstood as an idyllic poet of beetles and buttercups, the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter has been rediscovered in recent years as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of nature writing's darker currents. One of his best-known and most accessible works, the novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in its first complete English translation, a rendition that respects the bracing strangeness of the original. In six thematically linked novellas, including the beloved classic Rock Crystal, human dramas play out amid the natural cycles of the Alps or the urban rhythms of Vienna--environments so keenly observed that they emerge as the tales' most indomitable protagonists. Stifter's human characters are equally haunting--children braving perils, eccentrics and loners harboring enigmatic torments. We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race, Stifter famously wrote. What he glimpsed, more often than not, was the abyss that lies behind the idyll. The tension between his humane sensitivity and his dark visions is what lends his writing its heartbreaking power."--Provided by publisher The first complete English translation of the nineteenth-century Austrian innovator's evocative, elemental cycle of novellas. For Kafka he was “my fat brother”; Thomas Mann called him “one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature.” Often misunderstood as an idyllic poet of “beetles and buttercups,” the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter can now be seen as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of nature writing’s darker currents. One of his best-known works, the novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in its first complete English translation, a rendition that respects the bracing strangeness of the original. In six thematically linked novellas, including the beloved classic “Rock Crystal,” human dramas play out amid the natural cycles of the Alps or the urban rhythms of Vienna—environments so keenly observed that they emerge as the tales’ most indomitable protagonists. Stifter’s human characters are equally haunting—children braving perils, eccentrics and loners harboring enigmatic torments. “We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race,” Stifter famously wrote. What he glimpsed, more often than not, was the abyss that lies behind the idyll. The tension between his humane sensitivity and his dark visions is what lends his writing its heartbreaking power. For Kafka he was my fat brother; Thomas Mann called him one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature. Often misunderstood as an idyllic poet of beetles and buttercups, the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter has been rediscovered in recent years as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of nature writings darker currents. One of his best-known and most accessible works, the novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in its first complete English translation, a rendition that respects the bracing strangeness of the original. In six thematically linked novellas, including the beloved classic Rock Crystal, human dramas play out amid the natural cycles of the Alps or the urban rhythms of Viennaenvironments so keenly observed that they emerge as the tales most indomitable protagonists. Stifters human characters are equally hauntingchildren braving perils, eccentrics and loners harboring enigmatic torments. We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race, Stifter famously wrote. What he glimpsed, more often than not, was the abyss that lies behind the idyll. The tension between his humane sensitivity and his dark visions is what lends his writing its heartbreaking power.