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Rock Crystal (1901)

by Adalbert Stifter(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

159017285X (ISBN13: 9781590172858)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

NYRB Classics

review 1: Not a great book. It takes 30 pages to start going. Sure we're told the travelogue beginning is intended to paint the landscape the siblings later get lost in. I get it but it didn't interest me. The morning after sunrise really did impress and that's only possible because of the long stretch of night and coffee bean extract (what's in the packages they're carrying? you wonder). But there's something to this minor story that works. It's just not clear if it had to take 75 pages instead of 50. I might read it again or junk it. I'm torn.
review 2: Beautifully translated, perfectly formed novella. Stifter is the "landscape painter" of German realist novelists, and this little novel begins with a liesurely tour of a mountain range, so that as readers we know our wa... morey around. Then two little children get lost in the mountains. It's not meant to be melodramatic: it's the opposite: a potentially maudlin story told with absolute calm and with fastidious and accurate attention to the Alpine landscape. Beautiful and serene.[return][return]W.H. Auden makes all these points in his intentionally simple introduction. Stifter means to make a Christian parable, but it is not a parable of redemption. It is about harmony: harmony of people with themselves, with eachother, with the landscape. People and mountains are largely silent. A person's regard of another shows how much they understand of that other: the boy of his devoted sister, both the boy and the girl of the mountain.[return][return]The pace and the purpose of the story couldn't be farther from the frenetic & hysterical inventions of our current novelists (thinking of McCarthy, Galchen, Baker, et al.).[return][return]it is a wonderful tonic. I would read it as a tonic, a reminder of the fact that the frantic need to invent clevernesses in every line, which has come to seem like nothing other than good writing, is a form of obliviousness to other meanings. less

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