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A review by likecymbeline
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E.T.A. Hoffmann
3.0
I've been caught up in a Hoffmann spiral, which is one of the weirder spirals to be caught up in. What is it about him that I can't seem to train my mind away from? There's this sense that he's Important to me, even though I can't say why. I can't mention Hoffmann without going deep into the realm of the intertextual. I say Hoffmann, and in the same breath I say Tchaikovsky, Delibes, Offenbach, and Schumann, and that's just the composers. I say Robertson Davies and Angela Carter. And I talk Orpheus myths and alter-egos and dark Protestant magic.
I bought this book back when I was eighteen or nineteen, but had to set it aside after finishing Part I because fall came and university courses began, and I never felt the freedom to return to it because I had the idea of it being a bit of hard reading. After all, it's the biography of a cat (pretty much plotless by default) interspersed with an anachronistic and fragmentary biography of the moody composer Johannes Kriesler. Hoffmann's indebtedness to Sterne is very apparent in the set-up, playing with the structure of what a book is, but it doesn't go nearly so far as [b:The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman|76527|The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman|Laurence Sterne|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403402384s/76527.jpg|2280279]. I'd have enjoyed seeing him push more against formal boundaries.
The cat writing his own autobiography is a bit gimmicky. There weren't a lot of anthropomorphic narrators in early novels, but the "novel" aspect of it wears off. Murr is convincing and consistent (that is to say, he's self-important, self-contradicting, and most certainly a cat written by a man who understands cats on a metaphysical level), and gives such gravity to events of his life that you are simultaneously aware of their insignificance and the probable relative insignificance of your own life. Or maybe I'm the one bringing that existential crisis to the table.
At any rate, the highlight of this book for me was Kriesler, a fanfuckingtastic alter-ego who, to my mind, cuts through some of the bullshit eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century tropes of Virtuous Protagonists vs Shameless Rakes. Kriesler is a little unstable, thanks to being a highly-sensitive musician and artist-type, but he seems rather real, despite all the fantasy elements of princes and castles and court magicians that surround him. It's his sarcasm, the fact that nobody can tell when he's joking, the way he pokes fun at social expectations, the fact that he peaces out of a good job he doesn't like on foot because it gave him bad vibes, like. He's fucking weird. You can see why he would make people uncomfortable because he's unpredictable, but he's shamelessly himself, shamelessly an artist, but taken over by moods of extreme rationality, and I think that's what endures about Hoffmann. He's such a polymath, so multifarious, the jurist and the artist, raised under the strictest order and regiment, which only increased his canniness and sarcasm. Is it this plurality that draws me in? Or is it just that Hoffmann is so damn weird?
I bought this book back when I was eighteen or nineteen, but had to set it aside after finishing Part I because fall came and university courses began, and I never felt the freedom to return to it because I had the idea of it being a bit of hard reading. After all, it's the biography of a cat (pretty much plotless by default) interspersed with an anachronistic and fragmentary biography of the moody composer Johannes Kriesler. Hoffmann's indebtedness to Sterne is very apparent in the set-up, playing with the structure of what a book is, but it doesn't go nearly so far as [b:The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman|76527|The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman|Laurence Sterne|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403402384s/76527.jpg|2280279]. I'd have enjoyed seeing him push more against formal boundaries.
The cat writing his own autobiography is a bit gimmicky. There weren't a lot of anthropomorphic narrators in early novels, but the "novel" aspect of it wears off. Murr is convincing and consistent (that is to say, he's self-important, self-contradicting, and most certainly a cat written by a man who understands cats on a metaphysical level), and gives such gravity to events of his life that you are simultaneously aware of their insignificance and the probable relative insignificance of your own life. Or maybe I'm the one bringing that existential crisis to the table.
At any rate, the highlight of this book for me was Kriesler, a fanfuckingtastic alter-ego who, to my mind, cuts through some of the bullshit eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century tropes of Virtuous Protagonists vs Shameless Rakes. Kriesler is a little unstable, thanks to being a highly-sensitive musician and artist-type, but he seems rather real, despite all the fantasy elements of princes and castles and court magicians that surround him. It's his sarcasm, the fact that nobody can tell when he's joking, the way he pokes fun at social expectations, the fact that he peaces out of a good job he doesn't like on foot because it gave him bad vibes, like. He's fucking weird. You can see why he would make people uncomfortable because he's unpredictable, but he's shamelessly himself, shamelessly an artist, but taken over by moods of extreme rationality, and I think that's what endures about Hoffmann. He's such a polymath, so multifarious, the jurist and the artist, raised under the strictest order and regiment, which only increased his canniness and sarcasm. Is it this plurality that draws me in? Or is it just that Hoffmann is so damn weird?