Gesammelte Werke: Der Gefesselte. Erzählungen I (1948 - 1952). (Werke in acht Bänden).: Erzählungen 1: Bd 2

by Ilse Aichinger

Includes:

The Bound Man
The Opened Order
The Advertisement
The Private Tutor
Angel in the Night
Story in a Mirror
Moon Story
Window Entertainment
Ghosts on the Lake
Speech under the Gallows

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, German Literature, Classics, Magical Realism, Literature

117 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Ilse Aichinger (born 1 November 1921) is an Austrian writer noted for her accounts of her persecution by the Nazis because of her Jewish ancestry.
Aichinger was born in 1921 in Vienna, along with her twin sister, Helga, to a Jewish doctor (her mother) and a Christian teacher. Her mother's family was assimilated, and Aichinger was raised a Catholic.[2] She spent her childhood in Linz and Vienna, where her family was subjected to Nazi persecution starting in 1933. Aichinger began to study medicine in 1945, working as a writer on the side. In her first novel, Das vierte Tor (The Fourth Gate), she wrote of her own experience under Nazism.

After studying for five semesters, Aichinger interrupted her studies in medicine again in 1948 in order to finish her second novel, Die größere Hoffnung (The Greater Hope).

In 1953, she married the German writer Günter Eich.

In 1955, Aichinger was awarded the Immermann-Preis by the city of Düsseldorf and in 1956, she joined the Akademie der Künste of Berlin. In 1957, Aichinger won the Literaturpreis der Freien Hansestadt Bremen. In 1963, Aichinger moved to Großgmain, near Salzburg. In 1971, she was awarded the Nelly-Sachs-Preis.

Reviewing a 1957 volume of her short works in translation, The Bound Man and Other Stories, Anthony Boucher described Aichinger as "a sort of concise Kafka," praising the title story for its "narrative use of multi-valued symbolism."[3]

She was honered the German international literary Petrarca-Preis in 1982. After 1985 Aichinger increasingly retreated from public life.[citation needed] In 1987, she received the Europalia-Literatur-Preis, and in 1991, she was awarded the Großer Literaturpreis of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste|Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste. Other honors included the Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis für Literatur in 1995 and the 2001 Joseph-Breitbach-Preis, which she received along with W. G. Sebald and Markus Werner.

Aichinger is the aunt of artist Ruth Rix.

Reviews

[Steve]

Ilse Aichinger (on left) and her twin sister, Helga

Nota bene: All of the texts mentioned below have been translated into English.


As briefly indicated in my review of Heinrich Böll's Billard um halbzehn (Billiards at Half-Past Nine), in the years following the end of World War II the Germans (and Austrians) had little interest in facing what they had done during the Nazi era. With the exception of a small handful of authors like Böll, most of the heavy lifting was done by the few German and Austrian Jews who had survived the Nazi madness. I have discussed elsewhere Nelly Sachs' moving first book of poetry, In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Habitations of Death, 1946), in which she directly addresses the Holocaust. Sachs was Jewish on both sides of her family. But Ilse Aichinger (b. 1921) was Jewish only on her mother's side.

Though Aichinger's mother was a very successful physician, after the Anschluss of Austria into the German Reich in March of 1938 she had to give up her practice and lost her professional positions. Her father divorced her mother to save his own career. Somehow, Aichinger and her mother survived the war (her twin sister managed to escape to England), but her grandmother and all of her maternal aunts and uncles were murdered in concentration camps. After an experience like that one can well understand that Aichinger had no patience with the emerging postwar society in which everyone got back to what is important: making money and spending it in very public ways. Instead of fleeing into the ideology of "success" as most of her compatriots were doing, she maintained that only through a consciousness of threat, annihilation and farewell could an authentic life continue after that war.

Aichinger wrote one novel and some poetry, but her strength was to be found in her short stories and radio dramas (Hörspiele), the latter a genre whose moment has come and gone. The volume Der Gefesselte (The Bound Man) collects Aichinger's short stories from the years 1948-1952 and includes the story that made her career, Spiegelgeschichte (Story In a Mirror),(*) when she won the Prize of the Gruppe 47, the extremely influential group of writers who made and broke reputations at their meetings, where up-and-coming authors read from their works in the hopes of receiving a blessing.(**)

Aichinger changed her style in later years to become occupied with language and its inadequacies and to grow increasingly laconic, but many of these early stories remind me of Franz Kafka's work in that they are allegories in which meanings are suggested but multiple and changing. And, like Kafka, strange circumstances are related in a seemingly realistic, somewhat obsessive manner in which the strangeness is briefly noted but either suppressed or quickly adapted to. Which of these two possibilities actually is occurring is part of the ambiguity intrinsic to these texts.

Typical of Aichinger's early style is that when the Second World War and the Nazis' treatment of the Jews is the focus, she removes specific time and place references (even in her novel Die größere Hoffnung - translated under the title Herod's Children - which is based upon her wartime experiences in Vienna), perhaps to open the text to a more general breadth of relevance, but perhaps also to sublimate and transform her pain (quite different from suppression or denial).

Though there are some undeniably weak efforts in this collection, there are also some striking results. One of these is certainly Spiegelgeschichte, which opens with a burial; the coffin is in the grave and the pastor is saying the last words prior to the final symbolic act of casting the handful of dirt. But then, as a mirror (Spiegel) turns right into left and vice versa (but not up into down), the story runs backwards, not with everything merely backing up through time like a reversed film, but forwards, back through time. The narrator addresses the deceased and interprets for her this forward/backward motion using short, matter of fact sentences, slowly revealing what led to that grave. The effect is remarkable as, in a passage of sudden rhetorical intensity, the spool accelerates its rewind all the way back to her birth. And then one is reminded of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."


(*) The stories in this volume have been translated into English and collected in The Bound Man, and Other Stories. By the way, it was apparently at this reading that Aichinger met her future husband, the poet and dramatist Günter Eich.

(**) The Gruppe 47 was far from perfect in its judgments. I mention, in particular, the fact that they were not ready for Albert Vigoleis Thelen when he read from his magnificent and baroque Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts (The Island of Second Sight), whereas they were ready a few years later when Günter Grass read from his magnificent and baroque Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum). Grass was besprinkled with their holy water and became famous while Thelen was not and did not, though Die Insel is at least as good as Die Blechtrommel.

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/112...

[Glenn Russell]

I first read Ilse Aichinger's The Bound Man when in college and felt a deep, instant connection with this powerful tale. I reread again in my early thirties and here I am drawn once again to this amazing short piece.

The story opens with the main character, a man who remains nameless, waking up with the sun on his face and under the buzz of flies; however, "when he tried to whisk them away, he discovered that he was bound." Bound by a thick rope, that is. "His legs were tied all the way up to his thighs; a single length of rope was tied round his ankles, crisscrossed up his legs, and encircled his hips, his chest and his arms." He reflects, "perhaps children had been playing a practical joke on him."

We are only given a few hints of his character, but one I especially enjoy is his sensitivity to natural beauty. "A few paces away lay the path across the plateau, and in the grass were wild pinks and thistles in bloom. He tried to lift his foot to avoid trampling on them, but the rope round his ankles prevented him." Here we have a man who wakes up bound in rope, struggles to his feet, can move only in hops, yet still is mindful of not destroying flowers in bloom!

A circus proprietor/animal tamer sees the bound man moving down a path. We read, "He moved slowly, to avoid being cut by the rope, but to the circus proprietor what he did suggested the voluntary limitation of an enormous swiftness of movement. He was enchanted by its extraordinary gracefulness." How impressed was the circus proprietor? The author writes, "The first leaps of a young panther had never filled him with such delights."

So, we understand the bound man is sensitive and extremely graceful. It doesn't take that much imagination to see the bound man has the qualities of an artist, which adds to the charm and power of this fable-like story.

The next thing we know, the bound man is the main attraction in the circus. The bound man's movement are nothing short of stupendous. "His fame grew from village to village, but the motions he went through were few and always the same; they were really quite ordinary motions, which he had continually to practice in the daytime in the half-dark tent in order to retain his shackled freedom. In that he remained entirely within the limits set by his rope he was free of it, it did not confine him, but gave him wings and endowed his leaps and jumps with purpose."

Here we have metaphorically an artist working within set boundaries, say, for example, like a composer working within the framework of a string quartet.

The bound man's art reaches such a zenith, the author writes, "The result was that every movement that he made was worth seeing, and the villages used to hang about the camp for hours, just for the sake of seeing him get up from in front of the fire and roll himself in his blanket."

Wow! The bound man is such an extraordinary artist he transcends the boundaries of simply performing as an artist for a set audience; for him, all of life is art. And to underscore how the bound man's art can be viewed as bound up (no pun intended) with life and death issues we read, "He was just the opposite of the hanged man--his neck was the only part of him that was free."

Further on, the author notes how the circus proprietor's wife would see how much free play the rope allowed the bound man and also touch his tender wrists and ankles and how "he told her that sometimes he felt as if he were not tied up at all."

Toward the end of the tale, a wolf roams the countryside, killing livestock and terrorizing the countryside. The circus performers join the villages in an attempt to hunt down the wolf but their efforts fail.

The bound man makes his way out to a distant hill and, predictably, encounters the wolf. The wolf pounces and the bound man seized the wolf by the throat. The author writes, to my mind, one of the most beautiful lines in all of literature:"Tenderness for a fellow creature arose in him, tenderness for the upright being concealed in the four-footed."

Unbelievably, the bound man kills the wolf. The language the author uses to portray the struggle is pure poetry. Rather than tell how this magnificent tale ends, let me simply conclude by mentioning how, after learning how the bound man miraculously killed the wolf, the audience turns on the bound man. The circus proprietor's wife takes his side. "She shouted back at them that they needn't believe in the bound man if they didn't want to, they had never deserved him. Painted clowns were good enough for them."

As in literature, as in life: the general population with their middle brow artistic values doesn't deserve the bound man-creative artist; for them, painted clowns are quite good enough. Existentialism? Surreal fable? Magical realism? This is a tale defying category.


Austrian author Ilse Aichinger, 1921-2016

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Then they must have laid him down carefully, just as a mother lays her baby behind a bush when she goes to work in the fields. - The Bound Man

The sun's glare intimidates this man back to sleep's already went. The flies vulturing you should get used to. Someone has bound him. Arms cut, legs with restriction. He smiles that it must have been some children's prank. I don't know, but the ping pong to innocent or malice is right on schedule. Night will fall, adults laughing. The bound man is the bound man in taking his chances on cat's cradle dancing. A Bambi's grace orphaned. A circus animal-tamer discovers the helpless elephant on a feather in his slumber. Ladies and gentlemen! The crowds are wide eyed and go native for The Bound Man. The other entertainers aren't as entertained, or maybe there was an ember of pity in their schemes to free him. He is one with his rope, knows where he can end. At night the animal-tamer sends his wife to check on his bonds. In sleep his face could be her child villain turned cherubic. Free him. Summer won't last past the fall. She can sit beside this man who cannot touch her and feel closest to another door. His rope is his pack, his will. A wild wolf faces off with this imprisoned wild. What will he do when the crowd stampedes them with judging eyes, the animal-tamer's wife cuts the whip. Man without knowledge of his forest versus wolf in his own fur. What will the bound man do now. Aichinger sees his future as the snow falling over the past. I loved that. I could see an abandoned forest for him, no visibility.

He wanted to shriek, but could not. He wanted to stretch out his arms to help them, but his arms were immobilized over his head. He was young and handsome and beaming. He had won the game, but had to pay the price. He was immobilised in the middle of the day just as the dancers opposite were immobilised in the middle of the night; and, like them, he would submit helplessly to whatever was done to him; he would be no more able than they to push the man from his ladder. Perhaps it was all connected with the fact that he was unable to die. - The Advertisement
They are going away on journeys exactly like the ones in the posters. The old man is risking his agoraphobic life in seconds bubbles popping (sun spots style) to plaster over their livesnotlives. A mother and her little girl, happy like in pictures. She is twirling to spin her skirt to spin herself watching her skirt. This little girl smiles at the little boy in the false sea. The people on the edge of nothing yellow sand see a salty spraying sea. The man sees what is behind their backs, he is on their rung on his ladder. "Youth" is above his head. "Come with us!" The old man is obliterating his nightlife view with another tourist's promise. The little girl wants to dance with the boy now. He couldn't do anything else but smile if he didn't. So he wants to dance too. Would he be blown away by the sea, in the nowhere to go in his own land. Or would land be land and sea be sea and you could go away with them. They don't hear the bill-sticker muttering "You're not going to die". They, who is they (I can only picture trains and out of world) don't know the little girl was outside her mother's hand and died in dance. A tragic train accident. Midnight and midday. The witching hour happens twice a day. People in pictures, people in shadows.

Isle Aichinger has something I want. When I don't know what I want, am consciousness tumored by my pain in the ass mood wants. I've probably pissed and moaned inarticulately about a certain kind of short story that ends with a "Ta-da!" punchline. "See?! I was right!" and I just want to say "But you geared the whole damn clock. Of course it was going to going to end when you said it would." Ilse Aichinger doesn't do this. When 'The Private Tutor' ends with "And he mistrusted grown-ups" it was how it was supposed to be in the giving in to the ghostly skin telling. The boy is alone in the apartment and he isn't to answer the door to anyone between his parents and his tutor. The beggar isn't a stranger by sight, how about an apple. He takes the apple without anything in him speaking to anything in the boy. Now the alone pleasure is beggared by empty. The tutor must be impatient over the tops of books, far away from where skies drive wind. But it's amazing, he wants to play a game. The noise we hear in the flat is the beggar! He is there, can't you hear him in threat. They've got him! In the mirror the man's fist is at him. Pale distortion. Door abstraction, the parents are home. Scream somewhere, it takes three men to take the tutor away. They had only wanted to play a boy says.

Writersnoonereads has a resourceful listing on their Aichinger entry on where to get her (tragically) hard to come by works. They really weren't kidding that most available are horror or ghost story type anthologies. They are, but they are so creepy because of the bent inside them. Not a "hook" of a story but a haunted melody in refrain. What if they were on another night, in a harmless elsewhere. In 'Moon Story' the most beautiful girl in the village a Russian doll. The next layer is bigger outer and finally the Earth, or the universe. Someone must think the moon is this because they can see it from where they look so small. If no one turns up then she must be the most beautiful. What if no one else was there then why would she need these men to judge her? I was all for that but she can't deal with this and sure enough a contender appears on a wish. The lunar tide's carry her weeds and her they were judged more beautiful than a weed flora. Ophelia's past eternity has its own gravity, a sadness that is beautiful in ache. If they switched places they could exchange halos. Or could they, if Ophelia stays behind on planet beautiful sadness and Miss Universe trails a train of beautiful sadnesses' watery funeral weeds. I always want to rail against something I can't actually rail against about "beautiful sadnesses". Someplace that is on planet nowhere that can't possibly get the satellite reception of what it looks like to anyone else. Ilse Aichinger somehow makes this closer to Ophelia's beyond and a longing to be with her, because it's not empty when it's someone else. In 'Ghosts on the lake' a woman fades away when she takes off her sunglasses. One day she kept her shades on when the sun went down and it would get it back on her. Like in 'The Bound Man', the summer cannot last. Will she fade away? I'm attracted to this time waiting to take it's chance on you when the symbolic beating is a pulse.

I had long since started fearing sleep like death. For what is death other than missing the angels? I would lie awake with staring eyes, waiting for the sound of their wings, for the silver in the air. I would creep to the window and gaze outside, but all I ever heard was the voices of drunks down below, and once I heard one of them call out "Hallelujah!" - Angel in the Night

They are young girls when bedtimes miss out and rise and shine steal between times. The older sister always says you always wake up too late, you missed the angels. You can just see the tips of their wings in the outside. Maybe they are the summer birds out of their time. Stillborn flight in windows. Maybe there is no heaven, only from where the pigeons drop. But maybe there is nothing but clouds in their rituals, no resurrections. Just this once. Once she will snow angel, tempting the heavenly bedtime. Will she miss out in the bright or blackouts? Once her sister is a stone angel made of snow. I didn't know that the angel she sees at long last is her sister's still body in their white courtyard. Her white smoke in chimneys, sky grounds. Keep them from leaving. The day of judgement is she has seen. It was the older sister only believing herself when her little sister believes. But all she can give her is "you sleep too late". And when she believes she only wants to keep them so that their expressions can convince her.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

These eleven short stories by Ilse Aichinger were written between 1948 and 1952. They were my first encounter with the recently deceased Austrian author.

The stories are written in a peculiar style, which was not easy for me to grasp at the beginning. They meander somewhere between reality and the surreality of a dream. Fanciful and imaginative, the pictures produced here can be compared to Franz Kafka in a way, but also to Roald Dahl. The prose has a striking, partially lyric, density.

This is what the author had to say in the foreword about the collection presented here:

If we take it right, we can turn around what appears to be directed against us; we can begin to tell from the very end and towards the end, and the world returns to us. Then, when we start to talk under the gallows, we talk of life itself. Even if the stories seem to have little that connects them, they have almost all been written from this point of view.
[my translation]

Recommended!


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought a slim cloth bound copy of this book while in high school. I was blown away by the title story. I used the book for a book report in a very challenging senior English class, but because it was such a slim book and the author was unknown to Miss Conn she gave me a D. I never had picked a skinny book in my life to just get by, so I with the help of the librarian got the fattest book we could find. Three days later I returned to Miss C with a report on Anthony Adverse (at 1223 pages). She probably never knew of my effort to prove her opinion of me wrong

As for the book; it's gone. As for The Bound Man story I found it again in some collection of the worlds greatest short stories and made a copy for myself. The story is of a man

[Louisa Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ilse Aichingers Antwort auf die Frage, wie man nach Auschwitz noch Geschichten erzählen kann.
Das Highlight war, wie zu erwarten, die 'Spiegelgeschichte‘. Die kunstvolle Machart (ambivalente Du-Anrede, retrogrades Erzählen vom Lebensende auf dessen Beginn zu) ist hier nicht kühler Selbstzweck, sondern dient dem Entwurf einer tröstenden Parallelgeschichte zu einer verpfuschten, für die Protagonistin tödlichen Abtreibung. Durch die zwei beim Lesen gleichzeitig vorstellbaren Zeitrichtungen verschwimmen nicht nur Tod und Leben, Ende und Anfang, es ergeben sich auch ganz viele verschiedene Verknüpfungsmöglichkeiten zwischen den einzelnen Wörtern im Text und ihren Bedeutungen – buchstäblich ein Text wie ein Gedicht. (Und thematisch leider viel zu aktuell.)

[Johann Guenther · Rating 4 out of 5]

AICHINGER, Ilse: „Der Gefesselte. Erzählungen 1“, Frankfurt 2016
Die erste Geschichte, die dem Band auch den Namen gab, handelt von einem Mann, der überfallen, gefesselt und ausgeraubt wurde. Von der Ohnmacht erwacht schleppte er sich zum nächsten Dorf, wo gerade ein Zirkus lagerte. Er lernte mit den Fesseln umzugehen und sich zu bewegen, ja sogar Akrobatik zu machen. Er blieb beim Zirkus und trat als „der Gefesselte“ auf. Nie legte er seine Fesseln und damit auch seine Kleider ab und wusch sich im Fluss so wie er war. Die Kleider wurden schlechter, aber die Fesseln hielten. Im Herbst wurde es bald zu kalt zum Baden im Fluss. Er dachte an Aufhören. Im Wald stieß er auf einen vom Zirkus entlaufenen Wolf und erlegte ihn mit bloßen Händen. Niemand glaubte ihm das. Das Publikum wollte es sehen und stieß ihn in den Wolfskäfig. Er aber erschoss den Wolf um sich zu retten. Man glaubte ihm nicht. Er lief davon …
Die zweite Geschichte: ein Mann im Krieg. Er ist Bote einer Nachricht. Bricht das Siegel auf und liest, dass er erschossen werden soll. Er will den Fahrer, der ihn begleitet erschießen und abhauen wird aber selbst von einer feindlichen Kugel getroffen. Der Fahrer übernimmt das Kuvert mit der Meldung. Der verletzte Soldat glaubt, jetzt werde der andere an seiner Stelle erschossen. Letztlich war es aber nur eine verschlüsselte Meldung.
Das Plakat: ein Plakatierer affichiert ein Plakat mit einem Jungen, der zu einem Sommerlager aufruft. Das Plakat spricht und der Junge will sterben, ohne zu wissen was sterben ist. Da reißt sich ein Kind von der Hand der Mutter los und springt auf das Gleis der Stadtbahn und wird überführt. Auch der Junge am Plakat stirbt. Sein Plakat ist schlecht geklebt und reißt sich los. Die vorbeifahrenden Züge zerreißen es.
Der Hauslehrer sollte auf das Kind aufpassen, während der Eltern weggingen, wird aber verrückt. Die Eltern kommen noch rechtzeitig heim.
Zwei Mädchen leben mit dem Vater alleine. Sie reden über Engel und wer an sie glaubt. Die Jüngere träumt dann von Engeln. Als sie wach wird liegt ihre ältere Schwester tot im Hof.
Mit dem Tod geht es in der nächsten Geschichte – „Spiegelgeschichte“ weiter, wo ein Begräbnis wegen Aufwachen des zu Begrabenden abgebrochen wird.
In der „Mondgeschichte“ wird die Siegerin des Miss Universum Wettbewerbs mitsamt der Jury zum Mond geschickt, wo eine noch schönere Frau angetroffen wird.
„Seegeister“ beschreibt Ilse Aichinger in Form eines Motorbootfahrers, der sein Motorboot nicht abstellen kann. Als der Benzin aus ist fährt es mit dem Wasser des Sees weiter. Eine unendliche Geschichte? Eine Frau kann ihre Sonnenbrille nicht abnehmen … Das sind die Geister des Sees.
„Wo ich wohne“: Eine Frau kommt vom Theater heim und ihre Wohnung ist ein Stockwerk tiefer. Bei einem der nächsten Theaterbesuche gar im Keller.
Die letzte Geschichte ist eine „Rede unter dem Galgen“.

[Cristina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked 2 stories out of all of them. I found the fact that there are no names in the whole book a bit odd (although quite original). I loved the Bound Man ie the first story and the Window Entertainment was amazing, very unexpected ending. The rest I found ok but nothing co pared to other short stories such as Roald Dahl sommerset Maugham or Eric Emmanuel Schmidt or even Sylvain tesson.

[Sandrine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked up the book for the 1st short story : the Bound Man. Fascinating, sharp ... really good piece.
Then more a personal challenge with short stories, they always leave me hanging unsatisfied.

[Charlie Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection was first published in 1953 and it remains uncategorisable. The edition I read has just been republished by the estimable Copy Press. In the title story, setting and character are mercurial elements within a dissonant layering of symbols that force us to challenge our understanding of both the material world and its surreal counterpoint. Others – The Private Tutor and Ghosts on a Lake – are more straightforwardly uncanny; another – Window Entertainment – reads that way until the last line. The extraordinary Moon Story could have been written by the Leonora Carrington of the 1940s. Story in a Mirror is a life told backwards. Both The Advertisment – in which a boy on an advertising hoarding comes to life but remains confined by the boundaries of the billboard – and Angel in the Night – are untethered and untethering; similarly (and yet not) Speech Under the Gallows has passages reminiscent of the latter but otherwise no reference points that I can call to mind. One story – the fable-like The Opened Order – disappoints, but only after you’ve read it three times to make sure you’re not missing anything.

[Diana von Dzurilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

V českom preklade - Kde Bydlím. Táto rakúska Madam mi vyrazila dych. Nielen jou preslávenom Speigelgeschichte, ktorá je bezpochyby najlepšie napísaným reverzom akým som čítala, ale poteší aj absurdnými rozhovormi, ktoré sú vlastne poviedky ale asi nie tak celkom.
Veľké prekvapenie od tejto lyrickej čiernobielej knihy! Odporúčam ak máte sklon k rozmýšľania nad textom, ktorý nemá dej.

Ďakujem.

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

啊她使得界限如此迷人

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5.

[劉凍青 · Rating 3 out of 5]

《镜中故事》获1952年“四七社”奖。
《这个时代的叙事》《镜中故事》《绞刑架下的演讲》——“我们可以从终点开始，又面向终点而作，于是，世界重又向我们开启。” 十分两极化的阅读体验。 读得懂的（或者我自以为读懂了），例如《被束缚的人》《镜中故事》《窗剧场》《湖上幽灵》——精彩绝伦！ 读不懂的，例如《家庭教师》《月亮故事》——这写的啥意思？章鹏高的译本序也莫名其妙。 19722

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sehr starke Erzählungen, erbarmungslos und schonungslos gehen sie mitten unter die Haut.

[Dariwby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Die Kurzgeschichten sind eigentlich noch spannend, aber manche sind etwas verwirrend.

[Paul Narvaez · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very Kafkaesque title story that continues to haunt.
The translation is strange, almost awkward in spots.
Wondering how it reads in German.

[Erwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.75

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguing, confusing and philosophical. A text that fascinates and inspires reflection.

[Tinka · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ich musste dieses Buch im Rahmen eines Kurses an der Uni lesen und muss leider sagen dass es nicht so wirklich meinem Geschmack entspricht.

Es handelt sich um einen Band einer Reihe von Sammlungen an Kurzgeschichten. Der Erzählstil ist sehr flüssig und eingängig und das gesamte Buch liest sich wirklich sehr schnell.

Die Atmosphäre aller Geschichten ist sehr schwermütig, melancholisch und deprimierend. Im Grunde habe ich kein Problem wenn ein Buch eine solche Atmosphäre kreiert, hier jedoch leider schon. Autoren wie zB Edgar Allen Poe schaffen es Melancholie und Schwermut so zu vermitteln das es den Leser völlig in seinen Bann zieht und fasziniert, das ist meiner Meinung nach hier leider nicht der Fall. Kurz um, es deprimiert nur und nicht mehr.

Fazit: Eh…es deprimiert und ist bedrückend.

Empfehlungen. Wenn man auf sowas steht…

[Bryn]

I could see the art of these, but they were all very much the same, and it is not a type of art that is close to my heart -- really the reverse of what I like & value, abstract characters and settings to illustrate philosophical or aesthetic positions, a lot of symbolism, nothing concrete or real or detailed. Simply not for me.