The first complete English translation of the nineteenth-century
Austrian innovator's evocative, elemental cycle of novellas.
For Kafka he was "my fat brother"; Thomas Mann called him "one of the
most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping
storytellers in world literature." Often misunderstood as an idyllic
poet of "beetles and buttercups," the nineteenth-century Austrian writer
Adalbert Stifter can now be seen as a radical experimenter with
narrative and a forerunner of nature writing's darker currents. One of
his best-known works, the novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in
its first complete English translation, a rendition that respects the
bracing strangeness of the original. In six thematically linked
novellas, including the beloved classic "Rock Crystal," human dramas
play out amid the natural cycles of the Alps or the urban rhythms of
Vienna--environments so keenly observed that they emerge as the tales'
most indomitable protagonists. Stifter's human characters are equally
haunting--children braving perils, eccentrics and loners harboring
enigmatic torments. "We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the
human race," Stifter famously wrote. What he glimpsed, more often than
not, was the abyss that lies behind the idyll. The tension between his
humane sensitivity and his dark visions is what lends his writing its
heartbreaking power.
