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Collected Novellas
The novella was Schmidt's preferred form at the beginning of his writing career, and this volume collects the ten novellas he wrote between Entymesis (1949) and Republica Intelligentsia (1957).The settings range from ancient Greece to 21st-Century America, but all react to the stifling conservatism and cold prudery of Adenauer Germany. Bursting with intellectual and sexual energies, resuscitating the German language after two decades of Nazi subjugation, these novellas revolutionized German literature in the 1950s and retain their power to shock and delight forty years later.Schmidt has been called a "giant of the modernist tradition, an enormously important talent in the fictional line of cruel comedy that runs from Rabelais through Swift and Joyce" (New York Review of Books). This edition of his collected fiction should restore Schmidt to his rightful place at the forefront of 20th-century writing.
446 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1994
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391 people want to read
About the author
Arno Schmidt
237 books211 followersArno Schmidt, in full Arno Otto Schmidt, (born January 18, 1914, Hamburg-Hamm, Germany—died June 3, 1979, Celle), novelist, translator, and critic, whose experimental prose established him as the preeminent Modernist of 20th-century German literature.
With roots in both German Romanticism and Expressionism, he attempted to develop modern prose forms that correspond more closely to the workings of the conscious and subconscious mind and to revitalize a literary language that he considered debased by Nazism and war.
The influence of James Joyce and Sigmund Freud are apparent in both a collection of short stories, Kühe in Halbtrauer (1964; Country Matters), and, most especially, in Zettels Traum (1970; Bottom’s Dream)—a three-columned, more than 1,300-page, photo-offset typescript, centring on the mind and works of Poe. It was then that Schmidt developed his theory of “etyms,” the morphemes of language that betray subconscious desires. Two further works on the same grand scale are the “novella-comedy” Die Schule der Atheisten (1972; School for Atheists) and Abend mit Goldrand (1975; Evening Edged in Gold), a dream-scape that has as its focal point Hiëronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and that has come to be regarded as his finest and most mature work.
Schmidt was a man of vast autodidactic learning and Rabelaisian humour. Though complex and sometimes daunting, his works are enriched by inventive language and imbued with a profound commitment to humanity’s intellectual achievements.
With roots in both German Romanticism and Expressionism, he attempted to develop modern prose forms that correspond more closely to the workings of the conscious and subconscious mind and to revitalize a literary language that he considered debased by Nazism and war.
The influence of James Joyce and Sigmund Freud are apparent in both a collection of short stories, Kühe in Halbtrauer (1964; Country Matters), and, most especially, in Zettels Traum (1970; Bottom’s Dream)—a three-columned, more than 1,300-page, photo-offset typescript, centring on the mind and works of Poe. It was then that Schmidt developed his theory of “etyms,” the morphemes of language that betray subconscious desires. Two further works on the same grand scale are the “novella-comedy” Die Schule der Atheisten (1972; School for Atheists) and Abend mit Goldrand (1975; Evening Edged in Gold), a dream-scape that has as its focal point Hiëronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and that has come to be regarded as his finest and most mature work.
Schmidt was a man of vast autodidactic learning and Rabelaisian humour. Though complex and sometimes daunting, his works are enriched by inventive language and imbued with a profound commitment to humanity’s intellectual achievements.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 23, 2016
In the left side of my back, the . The grassy suburban street; beyond, the flat bungalow façade. (She trampled with pleasure, and kept up her starling chatter).
Each piece from Schmidt is a tutorial in a new vision, a wonderful departure into the inseams of language and literature. The novellas appeared hardly that, more like stories out for a stroll, lunatics on the lawn. Each one possessed an upright, someone who didn't believe Pravda and saw that rent-to-own was a sham and would end in fire, misery and the Red Hordes. There were a few pieces: Goethe and Tina -- which indulged my book nerdedness to the extent that my heart hurt -- it swelled and stung with such sweet sympathy for the lonely book people. Come gather and climb on board. The reader's satisfied tears will be a worthy destination.
Each piece from Schmidt is a tutorial in a new vision, a wonderful departure into the inseams of language and literature. The novellas appeared hardly that, more like stories out for a stroll, lunatics on the lawn. Each one possessed an upright, someone who didn't believe Pravda and saw that rent-to-own was a sham and would end in fire, misery and the Red Hordes. There were a few pieces: Goethe and Tina -- which indulged my book nerdedness to the extent that my heart hurt -- it swelled and stung with such sweet sympathy for the lonely book people. Come gather and climb on board. The reader's satisfied tears will be a worthy destination.
November 16, 2013
1.) Romans à clef ? : He shook a negating muzzle : "Don't count as a reference as such; but the persons-in-question have usually been nailed down umpteen times elsewhere."
2.) [how brightly beams the morning star] ? (as is well known, the first letters of each of the 7 verses spell out a name). : "Counts as a reference !" he confirmed.
3.) Plagiarize ?. : "You can do it as often as you like. : On the contrary ! We take that to be a good sign that someone's beginning to be forgotten, becoming a rarity - and it's heartily welcomed !"
4.) Punishments ?. : "That happens relatively seldom. Thrashings are, of course, the order of the day - and usually quite justified : new arrivals, unsuspecting=proud editors of anthologies, often get frightfully lambasted; or biographers by their poets. The heaviest punishment of all, and one very seldom meted out - roughly comparable to your death sentence up top - is for sending [inspirations] up to the earth's surface. That's when some scribbler grubbing in a library (or even dreaming) suddenly has an [inspiration] : Someone or other would really be a very interesting person to do an evening radio program about." (At first I smiled right along with him; but suddenly ceased, and recalled).
& &
. / And then there's this cold consideration - and let that be the end of it ! - take one of those ever so clever wolfhounds : is he really any unhappier than in the days of his humanity ? There are personalities, leather-stockinged all-round, who voluntarily isolate themselves even as humans : restlessly roam the forests, by wind and storm; go wild like wolves, and devour; their bed old leaves, pallid in beauty, their lamp the moon, if they're wearing a hat, their roof is thatched. Now and then, into the bushes with something red-leathered Indian : might it not also be perfectly possible for a type like that voluntarily - indeed blissfully ! - to greet his external transformation into one helluva wolfhound ? That way he could effortlessly scour, instead of 60, 200 kilometers a day ! And a chic she-wolf, silver-gray, each hair black-tipped, would surely be preferable, in wolf circles, to the lady from Milo. / (some very witty wrinkles to it : the way said Tyras must have growled a laugh as he lifted the secret documents off Inglefield. Or the one yesterday, who immediately passed along to Uspenskii the phrase about [swapping] ! -Nope; most people - at least given the current state of intelligence - could probably care less whether they ran around as a wolf, or a human being capable of speech.) / ..... /
& & &
"Writers ? Oh go on !" - so we were agreed on that as well : "Barefaced cowards, that's what they are !" (they can stick their dotdotdots up their dotdotdots ! He nodded and asked about the deleted words, and got the details with no hesitation : when we geniuses are by ourselves, I'm candid, as is only proper.)
~~~
Post-Finneganean, Post-Wakean, Post-Freudian, Post-Punctuationean, Post-Formasfunctionalean, Post-Functionalformean, this "solipsistic" Hamburger who is a most "unmodern modern" does veryvery well one of the things the imagination alone can do- peel away time and space and on the page imprint that inner infinite, the wiry clockwork of working cognition and language-cascade representing the vivid, imprecise language of the conscious-unconscious- it is in the very style (and what is not hogwash but structure and style ?) it is in the very narrative(s)- it is in this very act of translation (John E. Woods, medium-as-messenger, a round of applause from the audience, s'il vous plaît; or better 'bitte schön'); it is of course in the very etyms of these Träume that creak and bow and scrape and sing in the moonlight and along the black desolate plains of future-past devastation, of pervasive authoritarianism, of violence, of Rabelaisiean laughter at the former/latter, of mathematics, of people doing bad things to people and the blissful retreat into the intellect, of the mystifying vastness of space-time, of the mystifying limits of material reality, of the reach beyond and between the latter/former, of orthography, numerology, geometry, morphemic-obsessive typesetting, word-and-worldsmithery... (...This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, methinks...)
February 25, 2016
amazing, astonishing, astounding, awesome, awful, eye-opening, fabulous, miraculous, portentous, prodigious, staggering, stunning, stupendous, sublime, surprising, marvelous, wondrous, A-OK, A1, awesome, bang-up, banner, beautiful, blue-chip, blue-ribbon, boffo, bonny (also bonnie) [chiefly British], boss [slang], brag, brave, bully, bumper, capital, choice, classic, cool [slang], corking, crackerjack, cracking, dandy, divine, dope [slang], down [slang], dynamite, fab, fabulous, famous, fantabulous [slang], fantastic, fine, first-class, first-rate, first-string, five-star, four-star, frontline, gangbusters (also gangbuster), gilt-edged (or gilt-edge), gone [slang], grand, great, groovy, heavenly, high-class, hot, hype [slang], immense, jim-dandy, keen, lovely, marvelous (or marvellous), mean, neat, nifty, noble, number one (also No. 1), numero uno, out-of-sight [slang], par excellence, peachy, peachy keen, phat [slang], prime, primo [slang], prize, prizewinning, quality, radical [slang], righteous [slang], sensational, slick, splendid, stellar, sterling, superb, superior, superlative, supernal, swell, terrific, tip-top, top, top-flight, top-notch, top-of-the-line, topping [chiefly British], top-shelf, unsurpassed, wizard [chiefly British], excellent
Read
July 22, 2016Arno Schmidt, "a giant of the modernist tradition, an enormously important talent in the fictional line of cruel comedy that runs from Rabelais through Swift and Joyce--or to say it straight out, a 'Major European Novelist,'...a very great writer." --Robert M. Adams, NYRB, 3 May 1981.
Such is the citation in Woods' introduction. But the NYRB website identifies this item behind a paywall:
Devil’s Brew
March 5, 1981
The Egghead Republic: A Short Novel from the Horse Latitudes by Arno Schmidt, translated by Michael Horovitz, edited by Ernst Krawehl, edited by Marion Boyars
Evening Edged in Gold by Arno Schmidt, translated by John E. Woods
I'd be happy to see a copy of this review should anyone have access and be willing to make it available.
But here's the beginning of the review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...
And here's a big blog post of some nature or other:
http://begining-aji.blogspot.com/2010...
Such is the citation in Woods' introduction. But the NYRB website identifies this item behind a paywall:
Devil’s Brew
March 5, 1981
The Egghead Republic: A Short Novel from the Horse Latitudes by Arno Schmidt, translated by Michael Horovitz, edited by Ernst Krawehl, edited by Marion Boyars
Evening Edged in Gold by Arno Schmidt, translated by John E. Woods
I'd be happy to see a copy of this review should anyone have access and be willing to make it available.
But here's the beginning of the review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...
And here's a big blog post of some nature or other:
http://begining-aji.blogspot.com/2010...
November 11, 2016
A wonderful collection of tales. 4.5 /5
October 25, 2014
out of fucking control
May 25, 2023
Wanted to go a bit more in depth on these novellas, did quick reviews for each followed by some overall thoughts on the collection as a whole.
Enthymesis
This was a strong opener, and establishes Schmidt’s proclivity for going back in time to ancient Greece to flesh out his ideas/criticisms for contemporary Germany. Our main character hates Roman conquerors, but also seems to equally want to distance himself from the current Greek state, and seeks a reality/existence beyond this dichotomy, serving as a parallel for Schmidt’s general dissatisfaction with post war Germany. While in Enthymesis the world is a disk on which our hero can run and run until reality itself bleeds away and he is able to transcend it, our world is unfortunately a sphere upon which we are only ever able to circle back upon the place we try to escape. A very surreal, frustrated story.
Leviathan
If Enthymesis was merely frustrated, Leviathan is apoplectic by comparison. A scathing, venomous snapshot of Germany at the close of world war two, in which Schmidt’s main character is a stand in for himself, waxing with fiery philosophy to anyone who will listen as the world burns around him. Schmidt decries God (his angry atheism another theme that will recur throughout his novellas) and advocates instead for the recognition of the Leviathan, a mythologization of the German state as a demonic entity that consumes and destroys all in its wake. For all his scientific and philosophical entreaties, it is actually the world around them that serves as the greatest supporter of his arguments, the blood on the ground, the hail of bullets, and the oppression of the snow and earth itself takes on an almost mystical quality. One of the few stories in which the average person is dealt with sympathy and not scorn for the most part, and ends on a surprisingly uplifting note.
Gadir
We return to antiquity to witness the planning and execution of the world’s quietest jailbreak, concocted by a very old man. Schmidt continues to mine the effects of a seemingly inherent cruelty in man, on both a societal and individual level. Our prisoner is locked up for supposedly trying to see more of the world, for overreaching his place. Again we feel the constraints of Schmidt’s German society, it’s post war conservatism and regulation. The man escapes only to immediately die, is it a triumph to die free or a failure to have lived so long enslaved? Maybe for Schmidt it is neither, but simply how life is, reinforced by a great ending in which we read a sterile, obsequious report about the prisoner’s death, a harsh contrast to his unfettered, wild thoughts, this idea of a static, soulless normalcy restored. This story felt a bit flat to me after the prior two, but that may have just been the lack of a frantic fervor relative to the others.
Alexander
This is one of the two stories I actively disliked in the collection. Another ancient allegory, this time paralleling Alexander to Hitler, and walking us through the reaction of the average person to the increasingly despotic power grabs of dangerous men as our main character grows disenfranchised with the idea of Alexander, a man he once admired. It focuses on the futility of conquest as a means of unity and the disempowerment of the individual when faced with systemic evil, but the story rolls on interminably with no real rise in action or stakes or even concept. Schmidt’s low opinion of the common man hurts this story as it makes his characters less compelling when he obviously hates them, and our main character is one of his least interesting.
The Displaced
This is a massive leap in quality following Alexander, my favorite of the collection. The plot follows a handful of Germans being displaced, and the intermittent hopelessness and anger that play back and forth in our character’s mind as he is shuttled about like inconvenient livestock, a society and world that feels deeply broken in an uncaring, inhuman way. The key twist here is that Schmidt marries this intellectual despair with the rush and sexual energy of newfound love, as we witness our character fall in love with an old acquaintance he happens to be displaced with. This ping pong effect of joy and grief, what is most inhuman and most human about us, societal rot and immediate intimacy, is powerful, hopeful, fun, and unique. The chronological placement of this story relative to what comes before feels like Schmidt’s coming out party as far as being a stylistic, tonal, and thematic step up in quality.
Lake Scenery with Pocahontas
Another strong story, Lake Scenery is the ostensibly simple recounting of two men meeting two women on a lakeside vacation and pairing off for a fling. Schmidt critically hammers in all the physical, awkward, unattractive shortcomings of these men and women, their un-sexiness, but contrasts this against their joint revelry in eroticism and sexuality. Lake Scenery is a joyful and funny and juvenile fantasy presented as the necessary core of what is being human, and which leans entirely into Schmidt’s thematic throughline of enjoying the sexuality and physicality of the present and casting all else aside. He concludes with the expected but still depressing rug pull of a vacation ending, a fantasy dissipating, a miserable reality to return to.
Cosmas
Bookending these preceding two strong stories are his two weakest, Cosmas is a painful slog and the low point of this collection. Another antiquity tale, we follow a boy taking lessons from his landowner with the man’s daughter, the two fall in love with the boy overcoming the teacher’s Christian preaching with the power of atheism, converting the daughter and being given the land for his own and her hand in marriage. If that summary feels tongue in cheek it is very much how it reads, fairy tale esque, circling themes and narrative set ups that Schmidt has used with greater affect in his prior works. His acerbic atheism, a strong undercurrent throughout his works, here dominates everything, the story is an overly long rant against religion that brings nothing particularly new or interesting to the table that he wasn’t able to cover sufficiently before at a fraction of the length. This is an awkward story that stands out for its simplicity and long windedness.
Tina
These final three stories enter speculative fiction territory, with Tina as a tale of Arno himself visiting the afterlife, which is actually just a mundane, middle class existence for the dead while they wait for their final mention on earth to be permitted to slip into nothingness. Schmidt’s satire flips the common conception of life after death on its head, not heaven or hell, not reward or punishment, but boredom. And who would want that? The only release is to be forgotten, the more famous or successful one is, the more they are cursed to be bored and wait around. The story is fast moving and decently funny while laying on Schmidt’s nihilistic approach to the supernatural, at this point it is no longer a surprise in a Schmidt story that his dead are having sex and waiting to die, just like his living.
Goethe
Goethe follows a similar style set up, now the living can bring a dead person back to life for 15 hours to hang out. Arno himself spends a day with famous German author Goethe, and they discuss the state of German society and German literary history and contemporary writings. This is Schmidt as a bookworm, having a fun imagined conversation and rapport with a long dead literary giant. So much of their discussion and jokes and references are obviously German, as an American reader this novella is one I cannot engage with fully as I’m just not aware of so much of who and what is being discussed. The format is playful and Schmidt as a character and writer seems to be having a great time.
Republica Intellegentsia
The final and largest of the bunch, The Egghead Republic (a more fun name) is Schmidt’s weirdness taken to the max, a post apocalypse sci-fi dystopian theme park ride. He satirizes the cold war sensibility of major world powers and the post WW2 German government by painting a post nuked world full of mutant abominations, controlled by the government through eugenics, population control, and military presence. He also plays with the divides in the egghead republic itself, essentially showing up a future world in which we all learn nothing and continue down an escalating path of destruction and power struggle. At the same time this is Schmidt having the most fun, wild and wacky hijinks abound, and it’s really horny, a bit too horny for my taste to be honest but very on brand. Also some really fun satire and commentary on the role of a translator in conveying art, as the story is structured with footnotes from a translator who routinely misinterprets and loathes the author.
Overall
As far as Schmidt’s style and syntactic varieties go, it felt like he really hit his stride in the back half when he started italicizing the first few words of a sentence and breaking his prose into shorter, rapid fire paragraphs over the lengthy, sometimes boxed paragraphs that preceded them. This more aggressive styling raises the pace the reader can move through the text and plays off his usually frantic energy very well, while formerly it was a bit more work to focus and plow through the pages long paragraphs he was penning. (Not that Schmidt is afraid to make his reader work) His punctuation serves more as a visualization than a “language” to be decoded, and the more he leaned into the sporadic colons and periods, the faces, pauses, and movements they portrayed, the more fun and vibrant his work became.
Overall Schmidt’s low points frustrated and his high points really impressed, and ultimately it left me stranded in the middle, I don’t feel like I can yet form a definitive opinion on him. He is at his best when he is having fun, whether it’s reveling in sexual escapades, celebrating love and attraction, or geeking out over literary history. His worst is when he fails to cut his anger and bitterness with humor or humanity, and too often I felt an almost solipsistic self love coupled with total scorn for humankind. Works such as The Displaced and even somewhat Leviathan manage to balance these two to create some of his most powerful, evocative work, but I wish I had seen more of it. Looking forward to exploring more of his work!
Enthymesis
This was a strong opener, and establishes Schmidt’s proclivity for going back in time to ancient Greece to flesh out his ideas/criticisms for contemporary Germany. Our main character hates Roman conquerors, but also seems to equally want to distance himself from the current Greek state, and seeks a reality/existence beyond this dichotomy, serving as a parallel for Schmidt’s general dissatisfaction with post war Germany. While in Enthymesis the world is a disk on which our hero can run and run until reality itself bleeds away and he is able to transcend it, our world is unfortunately a sphere upon which we are only ever able to circle back upon the place we try to escape. A very surreal, frustrated story.
Leviathan
If Enthymesis was merely frustrated, Leviathan is apoplectic by comparison. A scathing, venomous snapshot of Germany at the close of world war two, in which Schmidt’s main character is a stand in for himself, waxing with fiery philosophy to anyone who will listen as the world burns around him. Schmidt decries God (his angry atheism another theme that will recur throughout his novellas) and advocates instead for the recognition of the Leviathan, a mythologization of the German state as a demonic entity that consumes and destroys all in its wake. For all his scientific and philosophical entreaties, it is actually the world around them that serves as the greatest supporter of his arguments, the blood on the ground, the hail of bullets, and the oppression of the snow and earth itself takes on an almost mystical quality. One of the few stories in which the average person is dealt with sympathy and not scorn for the most part, and ends on a surprisingly uplifting note.
Gadir
We return to antiquity to witness the planning and execution of the world’s quietest jailbreak, concocted by a very old man. Schmidt continues to mine the effects of a seemingly inherent cruelty in man, on both a societal and individual level. Our prisoner is locked up for supposedly trying to see more of the world, for overreaching his place. Again we feel the constraints of Schmidt’s German society, it’s post war conservatism and regulation. The man escapes only to immediately die, is it a triumph to die free or a failure to have lived so long enslaved? Maybe for Schmidt it is neither, but simply how life is, reinforced by a great ending in which we read a sterile, obsequious report about the prisoner’s death, a harsh contrast to his unfettered, wild thoughts, this idea of a static, soulless normalcy restored. This story felt a bit flat to me after the prior two, but that may have just been the lack of a frantic fervor relative to the others.
Alexander
This is one of the two stories I actively disliked in the collection. Another ancient allegory, this time paralleling Alexander to Hitler, and walking us through the reaction of the average person to the increasingly despotic power grabs of dangerous men as our main character grows disenfranchised with the idea of Alexander, a man he once admired. It focuses on the futility of conquest as a means of unity and the disempowerment of the individual when faced with systemic evil, but the story rolls on interminably with no real rise in action or stakes or even concept. Schmidt’s low opinion of the common man hurts this story as it makes his characters less compelling when he obviously hates them, and our main character is one of his least interesting.
The Displaced
This is a massive leap in quality following Alexander, my favorite of the collection. The plot follows a handful of Germans being displaced, and the intermittent hopelessness and anger that play back and forth in our character’s mind as he is shuttled about like inconvenient livestock, a society and world that feels deeply broken in an uncaring, inhuman way. The key twist here is that Schmidt marries this intellectual despair with the rush and sexual energy of newfound love, as we witness our character fall in love with an old acquaintance he happens to be displaced with. This ping pong effect of joy and grief, what is most inhuman and most human about us, societal rot and immediate intimacy, is powerful, hopeful, fun, and unique. The chronological placement of this story relative to what comes before feels like Schmidt’s coming out party as far as being a stylistic, tonal, and thematic step up in quality.
Lake Scenery with Pocahontas
Another strong story, Lake Scenery is the ostensibly simple recounting of two men meeting two women on a lakeside vacation and pairing off for a fling. Schmidt critically hammers in all the physical, awkward, unattractive shortcomings of these men and women, their un-sexiness, but contrasts this against their joint revelry in eroticism and sexuality. Lake Scenery is a joyful and funny and juvenile fantasy presented as the necessary core of what is being human, and which leans entirely into Schmidt’s thematic throughline of enjoying the sexuality and physicality of the present and casting all else aside. He concludes with the expected but still depressing rug pull of a vacation ending, a fantasy dissipating, a miserable reality to return to.
Cosmas
Bookending these preceding two strong stories are his two weakest, Cosmas is a painful slog and the low point of this collection. Another antiquity tale, we follow a boy taking lessons from his landowner with the man’s daughter, the two fall in love with the boy overcoming the teacher’s Christian preaching with the power of atheism, converting the daughter and being given the land for his own and her hand in marriage. If that summary feels tongue in cheek it is very much how it reads, fairy tale esque, circling themes and narrative set ups that Schmidt has used with greater affect in his prior works. His acerbic atheism, a strong undercurrent throughout his works, here dominates everything, the story is an overly long rant against religion that brings nothing particularly new or interesting to the table that he wasn’t able to cover sufficiently before at a fraction of the length. This is an awkward story that stands out for its simplicity and long windedness.
Tina
These final three stories enter speculative fiction territory, with Tina as a tale of Arno himself visiting the afterlife, which is actually just a mundane, middle class existence for the dead while they wait for their final mention on earth to be permitted to slip into nothingness. Schmidt’s satire flips the common conception of life after death on its head, not heaven or hell, not reward or punishment, but boredom. And who would want that? The only release is to be forgotten, the more famous or successful one is, the more they are cursed to be bored and wait around. The story is fast moving and decently funny while laying on Schmidt’s nihilistic approach to the supernatural, at this point it is no longer a surprise in a Schmidt story that his dead are having sex and waiting to die, just like his living.
Goethe
Goethe follows a similar style set up, now the living can bring a dead person back to life for 15 hours to hang out. Arno himself spends a day with famous German author Goethe, and they discuss the state of German society and German literary history and contemporary writings. This is Schmidt as a bookworm, having a fun imagined conversation and rapport with a long dead literary giant. So much of their discussion and jokes and references are obviously German, as an American reader this novella is one I cannot engage with fully as I’m just not aware of so much of who and what is being discussed. The format is playful and Schmidt as a character and writer seems to be having a great time.
Republica Intellegentsia
The final and largest of the bunch, The Egghead Republic (a more fun name) is Schmidt’s weirdness taken to the max, a post apocalypse sci-fi dystopian theme park ride. He satirizes the cold war sensibility of major world powers and the post WW2 German government by painting a post nuked world full of mutant abominations, controlled by the government through eugenics, population control, and military presence. He also plays with the divides in the egghead republic itself, essentially showing up a future world in which we all learn nothing and continue down an escalating path of destruction and power struggle. At the same time this is Schmidt having the most fun, wild and wacky hijinks abound, and it’s really horny, a bit too horny for my taste to be honest but very on brand. Also some really fun satire and commentary on the role of a translator in conveying art, as the story is structured with footnotes from a translator who routinely misinterprets and loathes the author.
Overall
As far as Schmidt’s style and syntactic varieties go, it felt like he really hit his stride in the back half when he started italicizing the first few words of a sentence and breaking his prose into shorter, rapid fire paragraphs over the lengthy, sometimes boxed paragraphs that preceded them. This more aggressive styling raises the pace the reader can move through the text and plays off his usually frantic energy very well, while formerly it was a bit more work to focus and plow through the pages long paragraphs he was penning. (Not that Schmidt is afraid to make his reader work) His punctuation serves more as a visualization than a “language” to be decoded, and the more he leaned into the sporadic colons and periods, the faces, pauses, and movements they portrayed, the more fun and vibrant his work became.
Overall Schmidt’s low points frustrated and his high points really impressed, and ultimately it left me stranded in the middle, I don’t feel like I can yet form a definitive opinion on him. He is at his best when he is having fun, whether it’s reveling in sexual escapades, celebrating love and attraction, or geeking out over literary history. His worst is when he fails to cut his anger and bitterness with humor or humanity, and too often I felt an almost solipsistic self love coupled with total scorn for humankind. Works such as The Displaced and even somewhat Leviathan manage to balance these two to create some of his most powerful, evocative work, but I wish I had seen more of it. Looking forward to exploring more of his work!
August 26, 2021
even when Schmidt stumbles it’s pretty admirable. Lake Scenery with Pocahontas is an all-timer for me, one of the best novellas out there if you take my word for it. occasionally tripped up over the (lack of) internal consistency in the syntax and punctuation, but i also don’t necessarily think that’s to the work’s detriment - sometimes things are allowed to just be funny
September 21, 2016
Doesn't come close to approaching the genius of his masterworks. Many of the novellas are forgettable though a few are quite good.
Read
June 10, 2025A round of applause and clapclap for who has now become one of my absolute favorite authors, and in no small part of his own essential contributions, a great indebtedness to its unparalleled translator.
I have yet to read an author who so fearlessly takes syntax and grammar and smashes it into a thousand pieces, only to madly reassemble it in so earnest and sensitive a fashion. What lies here are 10 pieces of modernist bliss, stories ranging from covering the political umbra of post-WWII Germany to spelunking through the Freudian ethos of loafers, authors, and libertines alike. Though his grammatical experiments grew to a sometimes-unwieldy extent, it's certainly more my fault than it will ever be his; for there are precious moments in some of these later stories that I can glean what is going on, just peeking over the linguistic barrier forged in so mighty a fashion. It is these spare moments of comprehension that I can peek through the greenery, over the bushes and lilac groves, over the cattails and brimming boughs, and see Eden for just long enough that I know there is an eventuality where my return to the works of Schmidt will always be a rewarding venture.
I've certainly had a helping from plenty of secondary sources online, including YouTube's surprising yield of a documentary, some reviewers, and a smattering of links to articles and blogs, all as an excellent primer to the world of so-called "German Joyce". Though, my only initial reaction to that sentiment - with only 2 of his novels and some 30 pages of FW under my belt - is that Schmidt feels much closer to me. That in my ties to Germany as my home and country of origin (in tandem with my American identity), has a greater impact on me emotionally. When he describes German landscapes, I know those landscapes. I have lived them. I have walked them. I have breathed them. They are within me as they are within Schmidt. Reading his prose is like a rising flood of emotional release soaking my ankles until I'm all the way up to my neck in his linguistic concoctions. Joyce has the barrier of being Irish and finding his particular in Dublin, a place that though I would love to visit, have absolutely zero ties to. It'd be like admiring the power of a creeping tide while ensconced in my tower of ignorance of his Gaelic worldview, whereas with Schmidt, I have no choice but to know exactly what types of worlds he has seen and etched into his writings, because they are just as much my worlds.
I very much have loved all the novellas I have read from collection, in tandem with some of the Collected Stories that I borrowed from the library - I eagerly await my copy of Two Novels in the mail; and to give some half-assed plans towards the eventuality of his typoscripts, I do see myself at some point tracking down both a copy of Zettel's Traum and Evening Edged In Gold.
There is always something to be said about the surprising power of literature for your own origins.
I have yet to read an author who so fearlessly takes syntax and grammar and smashes it into a thousand pieces, only to madly reassemble it in so earnest and sensitive a fashion. What lies here are 10 pieces of modernist bliss, stories ranging from covering the political umbra of post-WWII Germany to spelunking through the Freudian ethos of loafers, authors, and libertines alike. Though his grammatical experiments grew to a sometimes-unwieldy extent, it's certainly more my fault than it will ever be his; for there are precious moments in some of these later stories that I can glean what is going on, just peeking over the linguistic barrier forged in so mighty a fashion. It is these spare moments of comprehension that I can peek through the greenery, over the bushes and lilac groves, over the cattails and brimming boughs, and see Eden for just long enough that I know there is an eventuality where my return to the works of Schmidt will always be a rewarding venture.
I've certainly had a helping from plenty of secondary sources online, including YouTube's surprising yield of a documentary, some reviewers, and a smattering of links to articles and blogs, all as an excellent primer to the world of so-called "German Joyce". Though, my only initial reaction to that sentiment - with only 2 of his novels and some 30 pages of FW under my belt - is that Schmidt feels much closer to me. That in my ties to Germany as my home and country of origin (in tandem with my American identity), has a greater impact on me emotionally. When he describes German landscapes, I know those landscapes. I have lived them. I have walked them. I have breathed them. They are within me as they are within Schmidt. Reading his prose is like a rising flood of emotional release soaking my ankles until I'm all the way up to my neck in his linguistic concoctions. Joyce has the barrier of being Irish and finding his particular in Dublin, a place that though I would love to visit, have absolutely zero ties to. It'd be like admiring the power of a creeping tide while ensconced in my tower of ignorance of his Gaelic worldview, whereas with Schmidt, I have no choice but to know exactly what types of worlds he has seen and etched into his writings, because they are just as much my worlds.
I very much have loved all the novellas I have read from collection, in tandem with some of the Collected Stories that I borrowed from the library - I eagerly await my copy of Two Novels in the mail; and to give some half-assed plans towards the eventuality of his typoscripts, I do see myself at some point tracking down both a copy of Zettel's Traum and Evening Edged In Gold.
There is always something to be said about the surprising power of literature for your own origins.
Want to read
November 10, 2009Okay I plan to be reading this book for a good while now along with Joyce. Especially seeing as these are not from what I can tell meant to be read back to back. Given that.
The first novella "Enthymesis" (which apparently means something along the lines of deliberately making one's own feelings,or the internalizations thereof, honestly wiki is attempting to translate from german and that is the best I can do). The story is a diary of a man attempting to prove that the world is an infinite disk not a sphere, who refuses to stop looking for the end. Yes logically not sensible. but I think that makes the story better. 4 stars.
I will perhaps comment on other stories later and this could end up looking like one of gregs reviews.
Novella 2:Leviathan. This is a story about a solider. Again there is a discussion of math. The only discussion of spherical geometry I have ever come across in a short story. Also a lot of philosophy and religion are mixed in. I believe the leviathan to be that of Hobbes. and the story seems to focus on a man trying to talk to another person about who he himself is to distinguish the individual form the consuming whole. Although it also seems to be about the power and knowledge of the individual regardless of class (The poor may still know those things the rich think of as their own). The solider is a german under hitler (or perhaps not) it seems and it describes both the belief he will win and the poor conditions he lives under.
The stories seem to be about people and their thoughts.
3: Gadir. (the name of a phonetician outpost now Cadiz in spain [how many autonomous communities are there exactly in spain:]) So again we want to know if the world is round. a prisoner has ended up in prison and was attempting to escape to prove the world is round at 98.
The first three are from the same book Leviathan, which appears to be about understanding the world as something larger.
the first
The first novella "Enthymesis" (which apparently means something along the lines of deliberately making one's own feelings,or the internalizations thereof, honestly wiki is attempting to translate from german and that is the best I can do). The story is a diary of a man attempting to prove that the world is an infinite disk not a sphere, who refuses to stop looking for the end. Yes logically not sensible. but I think that makes the story better. 4 stars.
I will perhaps comment on other stories later and this could end up looking like one of gregs reviews.
Novella 2:Leviathan. This is a story about a solider. Again there is a discussion of math. The only discussion of spherical geometry I have ever come across in a short story. Also a lot of philosophy and religion are mixed in. I believe the leviathan to be that of Hobbes. and the story seems to focus on a man trying to talk to another person about who he himself is to distinguish the individual form the consuming whole. Although it also seems to be about the power and knowledge of the individual regardless of class (The poor may still know those things the rich think of as their own). The solider is a german under hitler (or perhaps not) it seems and it describes both the belief he will win and the poor conditions he lives under.
The stories seem to be about people and their thoughts.
3: Gadir. (the name of a phonetician outpost now Cadiz in spain [how many autonomous communities are there exactly in spain:]) So again we want to know if the world is round. a prisoner has ended up in prison and was attempting to escape to prove the world is round at 98.
The first three are from the same book Leviathan, which appears to be about understanding the world as something larger.
the first
September 17, 2020
There’s probably a word in German for the feeling of first reading an author of particular originality and creative genius. Or it’s more a state of mind reached after gaining an entirely new perspective enhancing the way one processes the world.
December 3, 2024
All words and signs one could attribute to the beauty of this collection are contained in itself and it's experience. Nothing more to add. Possibly the greatest translation achievement I've read outside of the recent Architrenius from Dunbarton Oaks which I'm already anticipating a second read of.
August 1, 2011
1995 PEN Center USA Award Winner for Translation
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