Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868)

I enjoyed it despite the disconnect between Hannah Arendt's blurb on the back cover... "Stifter can be compared to no other writer of the nineteenth century in pure happiness, wisdom, and beauty"... and this from W.H. Auden's adapted NYT review from 1945 that serves as the introduction: "in 1868, ill and discouraged by the public indifference to his two big novels, Nachsommer and Witiko, he cut his own throat."

The novella is delicious in its description of the two valleys high up in the Alps, connected by mountainous col, in which the action takes place, and of the extremely tight-knit and resistant to outsiders attitude of the villagers of Gschaid. Arendt's description of Stifter as the greatest landscape-painter in literature in his time makes sense. A strong picture is conveyed of the village and the route through the forest and mountains the children in the tale will soon take to their grandparent's home the next valley over, which is something like a 3 hour walk. Why are two small children walking alone for 3 hours through the high Alps? Different time and place, that!

The children, Conrad and Sanna, frequently walk from Gschaid to their mother's parents in Millsdorf. Because of this they, like their mother, are not fully accepted as part of Gschaid, showing how extremely insular these people are. It is Christmas Eve, or Holy Eve in this culture, when the story takes place. Unaware of the portents of bad weather (a stream trickling a clear bright blue means much colder weather coming down, which has frozen the ground upstream preventing sediment from falling into the water as it flows... good tip!) they visit their grandparents, have lunch, and set off back home.

On their way back a ferocious blizzard descends, and the children lose their way. They stray high off into the mountain's glacier field and its stark and treacherous terrain. Completely lost, they survive the night and are found the next day by search parties from Gschaid.

The story ends as a parable: having barely avoided tragedy this Holy Eve and Christmas Day, the villagers now fully accept the children and their mother; they are henceforth no longer treated as outsiders. As upright and industrious as these people may have been, they surely could have used a lesson in loving one's neighbors.

To quote Auden again, "To bring off, as Stifter does, a story of this kind, with its breathtaking risks of appalling banalities, is a great feat. What might so easily have been a tear-jerking melodrama becomes in his hands a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature."… (more)

I’d hardly call Stifter or his stories “obscurities,” but the word certainly fits the other two others here, both writing from the German-speaking borderlands of Europe, one from what is now Latvia and the other from what is now the Czech Republic (sorry, I just can’t use its new name; it sounds like a drug or a toy or…I don’t know what). The stories, including Stifter’s, are all ably done, enjoyable to read, but that’s as far as I’ll go. My time was definitely not wasted, but I also won't go to great lengths to see the other two writers out, though their personal stories are interesting. All three stories qualify as obscurities, I’m sorry to say. Even Stifter’s—and I am a big fan of his writing. This particular story, though, is extraordinarily, almost unforgiveably, slow. Some 95% of the story is setup to a very quick and thoroughly predictable end. (Final note: this was apparently a labor of love by the translators who dedicate the work to a professor. They do not identify themselves, their relationship to the dedicatee, or their qualifications. While their German may be fluent and even excellent, their translations are too often a little awkward or worse. This volume would have benefitted from a good editor--or someone who read the translations and pointed out the infelicities to them before they published it.)… (more)