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Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He committed double suicide with a terminally ill friend.This sparkling new translation from Michael Hofmann makes for a fine entry point into Kleist's passionate, grotesque, hysterical, and deeply strange body of work
The New Yorker
Michael Kohlhaas: a story about bravery and its twin, stupidity
- Roberto Bolaño,
The morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist's plays and tales were mined-is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, most of Goethe is a classroom bore
- Susan Sontag,
Sometimes you find a brother, and you instantly know that you are no longer alone. I experienced this with Kleist
- Werner Herzog,
His sentences are remarkable - great hatchet-blows of thought, an implacable narrative speed, a pulverizing sense of inevitability. No wonder Kafka liked him so much
- Paul Auster,
Kleist's narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as historical-even in his day nobody wrote as he did. An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences painfully soldered together and driven by a breathless tempo.
- Thomas Mann,
<i>Michael Kohlhaas </i>is an influential book, loved by best of all by early 20th-century European writers, including Rilke, Mann and Kafka... The wonder of this story is its relentless, vertiginous escalation
- John Self, Observer
<i>Michael Kohlhaas</i> could be called a pathology of obsession, or a juridical riddle, or even a kind of magnicent taunt, though none of these is right, or right enough. One must merely read it, and then read it again, staggered by its sheer acceleration, its furious savagery, its vertiginous authority, its exquisite prolongment of closure as event follows improbable event. Kohlhaas is one of literature's eternal characters because he outpaces any interpretive framework. His indomitable reality exceeds our own.
The New Yorker
Kleist is a giant, Cervantes's heir and a one-man avant-garde of the modern German novel.
The Guardian
Our sort is nothing compared to Kleist.
- Rainer Maria Rilke,
'I finished it in one sitting. Probably for the tenth time... it carries me along waves of wonder' Franz Kafka
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS HAS BEEN WRONGED. HE WILL HAVE JUSTICE.
Based on the real life of an ordinary horse-dealer cheated by a government official, Michael Kohlhaas is the darkly comical and magnificently weird story of one man's alienation from a corrupt legal system. When his attempts to claim his rights are thwarted by bureaucracy and nepotism, Kohlhaas vows to take justice into his own - increasingly bloody - hands. Will he be remembered as a dangerous enemy of the peace, or a vigilante hero?
Praised by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Susan Sontag, Roberto Bolaño, Werner Herzog, and J. M. Coetzee, this is one of the most influential tales in German literature. In this vital new translation by the renowned poet Michael Hofmann, Kleist's bizarre, brutal and maddening story is urgent today.