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wille44's review against another edition
2.5
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.
freewaygods's review
challenging
dark
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.25
What an experience. Collected Novellas serves as an excellent introduction to the work of Arno Schmidt. While he may seem intimidating at first, the chronological sequence of novellas in this collection serves as a great on-ramp to acclimate you to his particularities of narrative and style as you read through the book. What is truly the most remarkable is that his stylistic experiments do not simply serve to cover over for a lack of emotional depth— on the contrary, his stories are bursting with melancholy, longing, confusion, bittersweet longing, along with hope, élan, mischievousness, promiscuity. The way Schmidt plays these off of one another dialectically is an immense pleasure to read. Highly recommend, if you can get a hold of a copy.
jasminenoack's review against another edition
Okay 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
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