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Loading... Rock crystal (original 1845; edition 1853)by Adalbert Stifter
Work detailsRock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter (1845)
This was all landscape and texture; perhaps Stifter's other work—like the out of print Indian Summer, which I've often heard cited as one of the best in the genre of the German bildungsroman—is worth exploring. Rock Crystal was interesting in how the village and its boundaries are sketched, but it was too extended and repetitious in its allegories. (  ) proustitute | Mar 31, 2013 |  A simple tale of two young children, elder brother and his sister, making their way back from visiting their grandmother in the neighbouring valley. It is Christmas Eve and the children are following a familiar route over the mountain pass when snow starts falling, at first a source of joy, then confusion as their footsteps disappear in the ensuing snowstorm. The brother, Konrad, is unable to distinguish the familiar landmarks and although they push on with childish enthusiasm the children are forced by the terrain to follow a higher and more exposed path onto the glacier. As night falls they seek shelter in a cave and can only hope that the morning will bring better prospects. Stifter delights in descriptions of the natural landscape and details how the childrens' surroundings gradually change as they journey through a strange wintery landscape which takes on bizarre fantastic shapes and colours as they are journey ever higher. Whether because of the quality of the writing, or out of sentiment, I became involved in the story and wanted to learnt the fate of the children and whether they would survive their night on the mountain. The edition I have is in the original German and contains notes clarifying some of Stifter's more colloquial or now archaic expressions. (  ) supersnake | Jan 25, 2013 | Rock Crystal (1845) has some serious fans - Thomas Mann and A H Auden - plus a translation re-issued by the New York Review of Books in 2008, giving it a sort of literary pass of worthiness. Unfortunately, I was totally unmoved. Maybe my old translation is at fault, or the slow and uneventful plot, or simply a lack of cultural context. I need to read the most recent 1945 translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore and not the 1914 Lee M. Hollander translation. Pushkin Press also published the Mayer/Moore translation in 2001, it's probably now in the public domain, since two major publishers have it in print at the same time. Read via LibriVox, expertly narrated by Greg W. (  ) Stbalbach | Apr 19, 2011 | This unassuming novella strikes a deep chord. One never does know precisely what two children lost in an alpine snowstorm encounter, but the beauty of the telling of their tale is striking; the vision lingers. The unreckonable mountain is as much a focus of the story as are the characters—it is actually by far the most delineated, the most detailed sketch. The power of this simple story lies perhaps in its lingering descent from the mountain peaks into two small towns in neighboring valleys, and only then into the lives of some of their inhabitants—a godlike view, if you will, that serves to hold the fate of two small and unformed beings against the weight and longevity of a glacial age, somehow for a moment balancing the two. I'll echo others in this: you'll be glad if you skip Auden's rather perfunctory introduction or go back to it only after you've read the story. (  ) seidchen | Mar 29, 2010 | Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal is a simple story almost a parable or a fairytale except that he spends so much time detailing the life and culture of the mountains. Stifter saves the story through is appreciation of the combined beauty and danger of nature (as expressed in the snow storm and the mountain pass). The moutain and the storm almost become characters in the story. I was also intrigued by the tension between the Catholicism of the villagers and a sense of the divine being dwarfed by nature and nature itself as the threat against human existence which seems more akin to the sense of nature in early Nordic sagas. I don't want to read too much into it since is is essentially a simple tale, but I liked it more than I anticipated. My only complaint is that one should wait to read the introduction by Auden until after reading the story since he gives the plot of the story almost immediately and it ruined the sense of discovery I might have otherwise felt about the story. (  ) Marensr | Oct 13, 2009 | no reviews | add a review
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