New Review @ TQC

The latest review at The Quarterly Conversation is of Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, an author of which Thomas Mann once said “Kleist’s narrative language is something completely unique.”

Check it out:

Happy endings are in short supply in the Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist—a collection of tales that surprisingly calls to mind Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. The featured characters in von Kleist’s stories tend to be imperiled by those very qualities that human beings treasure most: unflinching love, generosity, loyalty, and a sense of justice. At the end of the day, the protagonists populating these narratives have little left except moral victories. It is a foregone conclusion that things will end badly for them.

The doom and gloom engulfing these characters shouldn’t come as a shock. Writers write what they know, and von Kleist certainly knew a thing or two about disappointment . . .