Unlike Cervantes’ Don Quixote (with which this fascinating novel might be contrasted), The Adventurous Simplicissimus remains a relatively undiscovered gem of a picaresque novel. Indeed, it is a mystery why this portrait of a war-torn Europe nearly 400 years ago has not been “optioned” as a major Hollywood movie or Broadway musical. Perhaps the first truly native German novel, it tells the partly autobiographical tale of a farm boy caught up in the Thirty Years War (1618–48), when lawless troopers laid the German countryside to waste and the population was decimated by battle, murder, famine, and fire. Grimmelhausen was only a child when he was caught up by warring Hessian and Croatian troops. As the boy narrator, he pulls no punches as he describes his family and other hapless peasants being captured and tortured by marauding mercenaries. The boy fails to understand the grim tableaux of extreme violence, rape, and pillage going on around him but nevertheless describes everything he sees with an engaging, ribald wit. Laid out in episodic chapters, Simplicus’s misadventures are engrossing and his descriptions of warfare are particularly gripping, not unlike a war reporter’s dispatches. Farther, his occasional forays into fantasy and philosophy (this at a time when witchcraft, soothsaying, and prophecy were very much to the fore) brim with historical interest. JH