Reviews

Read this for uni and was pleasantly surprised. It's quite a compelling gothic story which doesn't get too bogged down as a lot of 18c. fiction does, though it suffers from the switch to epistolary form halfway through.

We’ll take it as the exemplary 2.5 - a novel executed quite well but not brilliantly in a genre I don’t really like.

tangerinetwist's review against another edition

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mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

lexarobinson's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.75

This picked up as it went along - and varies through forms that are sometimes quite hard to follow. Schiller's romantic prose, however, is outstanding.

hannah_liest's review against another edition

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dark tense slow-paced

withywoods's review against another edition

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mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I thought this was going to be overtly spooky... I liked it all the same.

But I'm glad I'm not crazy and this tale is, indeed, unfinished. I wondered whether the author was expecting too much on the part of the reader by the end of it, which is just rushed and unsatisfying.

joecam79's review against another edition

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4.0

The rise of Gothic fiction in the second half of the 18th Century, also referred to as “first wave Gothic”, is generally portrayed as a peculiarly English phenomenon. This is hardly surprising, considering that the novel widely (if not uncontroversially) considered to be the first Gothic novel is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). It set the blueprint for a dark literary genre, obsessed with terror, death and the otherworldly, and was soon followed by works in the same vein by other English authors such Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford and Matthew “Monk” Lewis.

It would be a mistake, however, to consider this movement in ‘splendid isolation’ from what was happening in the rest of Europe. Indeed, some of the defining elements of the Gothic are shared with Continental literature of the period, shaped by the ideals of Early Romanticism and the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement. German readers, in particular, had a particular appetite for horror novels, some of which were translated into English or adapted by English authors. In writing “The Monk”, Lewis drew upon homegrown Gothic, but also upon German ‘horrid novels’.

One of the seminal works in the Continental canon is Der Geisterseher – Aus den Papieren des Grafen von O** (generally rendered in English as “The Ghost-Seer” or “The Apparitionist”), a strange novel by the poet, dramatist, novelist and philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). It first appeared in instalments in the journal Thalia between 1787 and 1789, only to be abandoned and left unfinished by Schiller who, apparently, developed a great antipathy to his own creation. It has just been published on the Alma Classics imprint, in a translation by Andrew Brown who also provides an introduction, placing the novel in the philosophical and cultural context of its period.

The protagonist of the novel is the Prince of ------------------ who, we are given understand, is the third in line to the throne of Protestant state. On a sojourn in Venice, the Prince becomes involved in a secret society known as the “Bucentauro”, a group of debauched members of high society, amongst whom count several influential prelates. He also falls in love with a mysterious “Greek” woman. All of this, however, could well be a front for an even shadowier Catholic group intent on converting the Prince to “the only Church outside of which there is no salvation”, fleecing him of his family’s riches in the process. The Prince is, in fact, being stalked by an elusive figure he refers to as “the Armenian” who is, according to some accounts, a protean spy for the Inquisition and, according to others, a Faust or Melmoth-like figure who has achieved immortality through devilish means.

It all sounds very convoluted, and it is. On his part, Schiller purposely adds to the confusion through the narrative devices he opts for. The first part of the story is recounted in the first person by the Count of O***, a friend and companion of the Prince. After the Count leaves Venice to attend to personal business, the story continues in epistolary form, through letters sent by Baron von F_________ , a member of the Prince’s retinue, to the Count, updating him on the latest developments in connection with the Prince. Both chroniclers are, by their own admission, unreliable narrators, who do not always understand the strange goings-on in which they find themselves in. The narrators cannot trust their senses – we, as readers, cannot take them at their word. This is truly a novel where, to quote the Bard, “nothing is, but what is not”. The work’s fragmentary nature is compounded by the fact that it was left unfinished. Reaching the last page of book feels like stepping out of a dream or hallucination, whose details and meaning lie tantalisingly out of reach.

The philosophy behind “The Ghost-Seer” is also curiously ambivalent. It is often held up as an example of Schiller’s Enlightenment ideals – to me, this is not that obvious. Take the author’s approach towards the supernatural. On the one hand, much of the novel’s atmosphere (and its title) is drawn from the otherworldly aspects of the plot, with one of its key scenes a seance-like occult ceremony presided by a shady character based on the Count of Cagliostro. Subsequently, Radcliffe-like, Schiller has his Prince unravel the supernatural elements, revealing them to be mere smoke and mirrors. Yet, the explanation is so complicated, that like the Count, we are almost tempted to reject it in favour of a belief that something otherworldly must have been going on. The same could be said of Schiller’s attitude towards religion. Unsurprisingly for a Gothic novel, Catholics get quite a lot of bad press. But Schiller also seems equally critical both of the drearier, stricter strains of Protestantism and of, at the other extreme, ‘freethinking’ unbelief.

For an unfinished, slim novel(la), The Ghost-Seer has proven surprisingly influential, possibly because of the questions it poses only to leave unanswered. It gave rise to a particular sub-genre of the Gothic – the “secret society novel”, variously referred to in German as the Bundesroman or the Geheimbundroman. It is also one of the first works to exploit Venice as a backdrop for dark and/or supernatural fiction, a tradition which continued with E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Zschokke and in the 20th century, Thomas Mann and Daphne du Maurier. La Serenissima it may be called, but its alleys and canals, decaying palaces and hidden campielli whisper strange secrets, if only one were to listen...

For the complete review, including illustrations and suggestions for Schiller-related music, head to http://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2019/03/friedrich-schiller-ghost-seer.html

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