Michael Kohlhaas

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 BolañoThe 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 SontagSometimes you find a brother, and you instantly know that you are no longer alone. I experienced this with Kleist – Werner HerzogHis 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 AusterKleist’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 MannMichael Kohlhaas 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 *Michael Kohlhaas 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

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.

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