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People of the Book
The setting for this novel is central Europe, during the thirty years' war that decimated the area in the first half of the seventeenth century. Two plots are skilfully interwoven: one centres on Axel Oxenstierna, Chancellor of Sweden. The other on Lars Larsen, a boy wandering through Europe with his small sister Hannale, in search of a man he believes to be their only living relative . .
- GenresHistorical Fiction
381 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
David Stacton
53 books10 followersAka Bud Clifton
David Derek Stacton (1925–1968) was a U.S. novelist, historian and poet. He was born on 25 April 1925 in Minden, Nevada. Stacton attended Stanford University from 1941–43, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951. He served in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector then lived in Europe from 1950–1954, 1960–1962, and 1964–1965. Stacton wrote under the pseudonyms Carse Boyd, Bud Clifton, David Dereksen and David West. Most of his books were originally published in England. He died of a stroke 19 January 1968 in Fredensborg, Denmark.
Stacton's novels are often low in dialogue, and his better novels are instead full of his witty scornful comments on his characters and life. At his best Stacton had an epigrammatic style and enjoyed a sophisticated irony, although antipathetic critics took him to task for pretentious vocabulary, a tendency to florid paradoxes, and anachronistic allusions (i.e. describing a 14th century Zen garden using phrases from Marianne Moore and Peter Pan). In 1963, Time magazine praised his work as "masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood" and suggested that "something similar might have been the result if the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London". His other literary influences include Walter Pater, for his choice of characters with frustrated artistic and emotional longings, and Lytton Strachey for his witty attention to history. Several of Stacton's novels feature homosexual characters prominently. Fans of David Stacton include John Crowley, Thomas M. Disch, and Peter Beagle.
David Derek Stacton (1925–1968) was a U.S. novelist, historian and poet. He was born on 25 April 1925 in Minden, Nevada. Stacton attended Stanford University from 1941–43, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951. He served in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector then lived in Europe from 1950–1954, 1960–1962, and 1964–1965. Stacton wrote under the pseudonyms Carse Boyd, Bud Clifton, David Dereksen and David West. Most of his books were originally published in England. He died of a stroke 19 January 1968 in Fredensborg, Denmark.
Stacton's novels are often low in dialogue, and his better novels are instead full of his witty scornful comments on his characters and life. At his best Stacton had an epigrammatic style and enjoyed a sophisticated irony, although antipathetic critics took him to task for pretentious vocabulary, a tendency to florid paradoxes, and anachronistic allusions (i.e. describing a 14th century Zen garden using phrases from Marianne Moore and Peter Pan). In 1963, Time magazine praised his work as "masses of epigrams marinated in a stinging mixture of metaphysics and blood" and suggested that "something similar might have been the result if the Duc de la Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London". His other literary influences include Walter Pater, for his choice of characters with frustrated artistic and emotional longings, and Lytton Strachey for his witty attention to history. Several of Stacton's novels feature homosexual characters prominently. Fans of David Stacton include John Crowley, Thomas M. Disch, and Peter Beagle.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 8, 2026
"...the Thirty Years War, the subject of Stacton’s last completed novel (was) “a time of disorder, riot, defeat, loss, survival, plague and pestilence.” Throughout, Stacton’s unsparing portraits of the major players remind me of a comment made by Saul Bellow about some querulous editors: “I could make those people very unhappy by describing them.”
"Stacton doesn’t demur. Sir Henry Vane, the British diplomat, is a “carrot pudding of a creature, pompous, self-important, childish, with the small close set-eyes of a discontented baby.” He mercifully has no sense of humour, for if he had, “he could not have looked in the mirror and survived.” Of Cardinal Richelieu, the Éminence grise seeking to prolong the war to weaken his Hapsburg enemies: “He had a tendency to gum his food. He was ostentatious, treacherous, and unduly addicted to cats.” I have no idea what the last detail signifies, but it seems damning. Of a French emissary’s snobbery: “[Charnacé] was […] distressed by stenches below stairs only if the floor happened not to be parquet.” And of a Bohemian noble: “In any room Wallenstein entered, you were aware of something worse that had just left […] He was a good everything except a man.”
"And our heroes? Though King Gustav is called “an insignificant northern snowball” by his Viennese enemies, Stacton considers him a “one-man avalanche,” a rare Nietzschean “overlord” able to order the world, temporally, around his aimless will: “Large men have no specific motives; they obey their own inevitability. Only little men act always in some cause.”
"In People of the Book, Stacton in a sense obeys his own inevitability. Some authors pare down during the late style; others embrace their baroque tendencies. Such is the case with Stacton’s epic. The novel is a monumental and exhausting account of the “fugue of war,” zooming in on rulers, two orphaned children making their way across war-ravaged Germany, and all the “odd creatures” that war “sucks […] out from their burrows”: a preening bandit and tamer of white horses, a self-styled Magician and his companion, a prostitute with multiple personality disorder, and two snow leopards.
"The novel’s large canvas is Central Europe during the Thirty Years War, but nary a paragraph goes by without Stacton turning his aphoristic, philosophizing eye on some little corner. It is like a tennis player going for the drop shot one too many times, but what an elegant drop shot it is. In a typical passage, a boy, Lars, tries on some ill-fitting armor he has collected from corpses, which sets Stacton off:
"The right costume makes one want to kill. It shifts the body’s weight and so alters its opinions. It is a way of hiding. It gives us freedom from ourselves, just as jail frees the prisoner from life […] [Lars] was austere by nature, and here he was lost in the luxuries of death. Few men can swagger naked. They need the weight of steel boots.
"That a shift in a body’s weight should alter a body’s opinions is both obvious — look at the difference between a rugby player and a football player bringing down an opponent — and startling. Stacton’s sharply declarative sentences capture the absurdity, but also the inevitability of Lars’s swagger, which is no less menacing for its ridiculous dependence on the weight of steel boots. Thus is a child initiated into the pointless and sensual mysteries of violence surrounding him.
(from: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/c...)
Praise from the novels publication in 1965:
'People of the Book is set in the Thirty Years' War, which began and still shapes our present system of world order. David Stacton's incomparable prose reveals how the treatises of scholars and the tactics of commanders so rarely comprehend the vagaries of the human condition. A book to put on the shelf with Thucydides' Peloponnesian War and Tolstoy's War and Peace.' Professor Charles Hill (author of Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order)
'A troubling and fantastic book... Stacton sets up a duel plot. One follows the fortunes of the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus, the other recounts the fate of an orphaned boy and his little sister who try to make their way across Germany from their ruined home to refuge with an imagined uncle.' Life Magazine
'[An] extraordinary evocation of the whole spiritual climate of the time; the very vapours of Teutonic mists seem to rise from its pages.' Frederic Raphael, Sunday Times
David Stacton is famously the lost genius of twentieth century American literature (see: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) and this was his final novel and it is as great, wonderful, troubling and impossible to forget as are all his others. It is probably not accurate to describe a novel set in some of the most brutal years of continental Europe's long brutal history and accounts of the horrors of war (it is not for nothing that my copy's jacket is illustrated by an engraving by Jaques Callot - see footnote *1 below) and ending that is at the very least horrifying as beautiful but Stacton writes with the pen of angel and while he make you weep he will never bore you.
All I ever do in my reviews of Stacton's books is praise his extraordinary abilities - I wouldn't recommend this ass the first book of his to read - that would probably be 'The Judges of the Secret Court' - because so few UK or USA readers know anything of the Thirty Years War and without at least a whisper of understanding of that truly awful war in which the name Magdeburg resonated with the same awful horror as Gaza does for some of us today.
This is a wonderful, beautiful, shocking, horrifying, life affirming and despair inspiring novel which unfortunately will never be read by the numbers it deserves.
*1 I can remember as a child looking through a modern copy of 'Miseries and Disasters of War' by Jacques Callot (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Gra...#) and being shocked.
"Stacton doesn’t demur. Sir Henry Vane, the British diplomat, is a “carrot pudding of a creature, pompous, self-important, childish, with the small close set-eyes of a discontented baby.” He mercifully has no sense of humour, for if he had, “he could not have looked in the mirror and survived.” Of Cardinal Richelieu, the Éminence grise seeking to prolong the war to weaken his Hapsburg enemies: “He had a tendency to gum his food. He was ostentatious, treacherous, and unduly addicted to cats.” I have no idea what the last detail signifies, but it seems damning. Of a French emissary’s snobbery: “[Charnacé] was […] distressed by stenches below stairs only if the floor happened not to be parquet.” And of a Bohemian noble: “In any room Wallenstein entered, you were aware of something worse that had just left […] He was a good everything except a man.”
"And our heroes? Though King Gustav is called “an insignificant northern snowball” by his Viennese enemies, Stacton considers him a “one-man avalanche,” a rare Nietzschean “overlord” able to order the world, temporally, around his aimless will: “Large men have no specific motives; they obey their own inevitability. Only little men act always in some cause.”
"In People of the Book, Stacton in a sense obeys his own inevitability. Some authors pare down during the late style; others embrace their baroque tendencies. Such is the case with Stacton’s epic. The novel is a monumental and exhausting account of the “fugue of war,” zooming in on rulers, two orphaned children making their way across war-ravaged Germany, and all the “odd creatures” that war “sucks […] out from their burrows”: a preening bandit and tamer of white horses, a self-styled Magician and his companion, a prostitute with multiple personality disorder, and two snow leopards.
"The novel’s large canvas is Central Europe during the Thirty Years War, but nary a paragraph goes by without Stacton turning his aphoristic, philosophizing eye on some little corner. It is like a tennis player going for the drop shot one too many times, but what an elegant drop shot it is. In a typical passage, a boy, Lars, tries on some ill-fitting armor he has collected from corpses, which sets Stacton off:
"The right costume makes one want to kill. It shifts the body’s weight and so alters its opinions. It is a way of hiding. It gives us freedom from ourselves, just as jail frees the prisoner from life […] [Lars] was austere by nature, and here he was lost in the luxuries of death. Few men can swagger naked. They need the weight of steel boots.
"That a shift in a body’s weight should alter a body’s opinions is both obvious — look at the difference between a rugby player and a football player bringing down an opponent — and startling. Stacton’s sharply declarative sentences capture the absurdity, but also the inevitability of Lars’s swagger, which is no less menacing for its ridiculous dependence on the weight of steel boots. Thus is a child initiated into the pointless and sensual mysteries of violence surrounding him.
(from: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/c...)
Praise from the novels publication in 1965:
'People of the Book is set in the Thirty Years' War, which began and still shapes our present system of world order. David Stacton's incomparable prose reveals how the treatises of scholars and the tactics of commanders so rarely comprehend the vagaries of the human condition. A book to put on the shelf with Thucydides' Peloponnesian War and Tolstoy's War and Peace.' Professor Charles Hill (author of Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order)
'A troubling and fantastic book... Stacton sets up a duel plot. One follows the fortunes of the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus, the other recounts the fate of an orphaned boy and his little sister who try to make their way across Germany from their ruined home to refuge with an imagined uncle.' Life Magazine
'[An] extraordinary evocation of the whole spiritual climate of the time; the very vapours of Teutonic mists seem to rise from its pages.' Frederic Raphael, Sunday Times
David Stacton is famously the lost genius of twentieth century American literature (see: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...) and this was his final novel and it is as great, wonderful, troubling and impossible to forget as are all his others. It is probably not accurate to describe a novel set in some of the most brutal years of continental Europe's long brutal history and accounts of the horrors of war (it is not for nothing that my copy's jacket is illustrated by an engraving by Jaques Callot - see footnote *1 below) and ending that is at the very least horrifying as beautiful but Stacton writes with the pen of angel and while he make you weep he will never bore you.
All I ever do in my reviews of Stacton's books is praise his extraordinary abilities - I wouldn't recommend this ass the first book of his to read - that would probably be 'The Judges of the Secret Court' - because so few UK or USA readers know anything of the Thirty Years War and without at least a whisper of understanding of that truly awful war in which the name Magdeburg resonated with the same awful horror as Gaza does for some of us today.
This is a wonderful, beautiful, shocking, horrifying, life affirming and despair inspiring novel which unfortunately will never be read by the numbers it deserves.
*1 I can remember as a child looking through a modern copy of 'Miseries and Disasters of War' by Jacques Callot (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Gra...#) and being shocked.
June 2, 2013
What to say? This is a very complex book to read as well as to judge. It was first published in 1964 and is now part of a modern classics series, released by Faber and Faber.
The setting of the book is the German countries and Sweden during he Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The book consists of a dual plot; on the one hand we read about the Swedish king Gustavus and his plottings during the war. But at the same time we read about two orphaned children looking for their uncle.These two lines are sprinkled with a good dose of mystery and magic and grim war violence.
There is no doubt about the penmanship of Stacton; the ease with which he manages his rather difficult subject matter is remarkable. He weaves war strategies with treatises of scholars and throws in some Shakespeare (The Tempest)as well. He writes beautiful prose but it was all a bit too much in my opinion. He just goes on and on, without coming to some sort of point and loses himself along the way.
I would recommend this book to those with an interest in the tactics of war, who love a classic tragedy and don't shy away from violence.
The setting of the book is the German countries and Sweden during he Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The book consists of a dual plot; on the one hand we read about the Swedish king Gustavus and his plottings during the war. But at the same time we read about two orphaned children looking for their uncle.These two lines are sprinkled with a good dose of mystery and magic and grim war violence.
There is no doubt about the penmanship of Stacton; the ease with which he manages his rather difficult subject matter is remarkable. He weaves war strategies with treatises of scholars and throws in some Shakespeare (The Tempest)as well. He writes beautiful prose but it was all a bit too much in my opinion. He just goes on and on, without coming to some sort of point and loses himself along the way.
I would recommend this book to those with an interest in the tactics of war, who love a classic tragedy and don't shy away from violence.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews