The Marquise of O and Other Stories

As a playwright, German classic Kleist sits on top of the Olymp, right up there with Goethe and Schiller. He also left a relatively small prose oeuvre behind when he died at 34 (in a suicide pact). An unpublished 2 volume novel is said to have disappeared. What we have is this bunch of stories and some journalism, and letters. He is a classic, but he was no classicist (hence no boredom like eg Goethe's Elective Affinities), and also no romantic. He belonged to no school but his own. His stories take us into worlds of madness. Passions and restrictive social norms collide and cause endless havoc. A frequent motive is what we would call 'honor killings' nowadays: people, usually women, subjected to the extreme punishment for inappropriate relations. The title story itself (set in Napoleonic times in Italy) is not quite as extreme in this regard: the Marquise 'only' gets expelled from her parents' home and ostracized, because she does not know how she got pregnant. Hard to believe, admittedly. Hardship steels her character and she attacks: she publishes an ad asking for the father to step up, she would forgive him and marry him. When he turns up it is a man whom she had had a crush on, a Russian count and officer who had saved her from rapists during the war, and had found her fainted. Well, well. Since he had been her angel, now he becomes her devil. But all in all, this is a comparatively sane story, as far as the protagonists go. There is Kohlhaas, the horse trader who becomes a rebel and outlaw in protest against some junkers mistreating his horses and his servant. In a very German solution, he finds justice for the horses, but also for his crimes. Blind justice with her scale works both ways. Two cases of honor killings: A young convent woman in Chile in the 17th century gets sentenced to death for being pregnant, gets saved on the way to the scaffold by a huge earthquake, survives, meets the father of her child, believes to be safe, and goes back to Santiago. A mistake. A noble woman in the 14th century in Germany is subjected to a Gottesurteil (God's verdict?) by duel when an accused murderer, a knight, claims her as his alibi; her admirer challenges the bad guy. A duel is set up which is supposed to decide over truth. If her friend loses, her denial is considered a lie and she will be burned.(Hard to believe, isn't it? But as Kleist wrote somewhere, probability is not always on the side of truth.) More violence and madness: A mulatta teenage girl in Haiti during the slave rebellion after the French revolution falls in love with a French officer from Switzerland, who is a captive in the black household where she lives. She tries to save him, which would be her end by her own people. The couple makes romantic promises, but he misunderstands her tactics for liberating him (Swiss have a reputation for being slow sometimes), and kills her. Kleist was his own world in literary matters, did not belong to anybody's school; he was also not in

Because of the intricacy of speech in the days before our short-order transient/on-the- run culture, with all today's media distractions and clashes of civilizations, life in the 17- and 1800's was seen much closer. Little details were magnified, concepts got more-deeply probed; people made a big deal out of nuance. And abstracts like honor and integrity and reputation, too. Kliest's more-complex and often really-long paragraphs dissect his subjects. So they grow vivid and more keenly felt. Of course moral values back in those times were strict and unyielding. Most everything in The Marquise of O- turns on manners and mores. They contrast so sharply with ours today as to make us think of ours today. In our time it's our appetites and ambitions. Suddenly reading about people driven by morality and tradition is quite a comparison to our times. Maybe we have it better, maybe not. Even though the writing as well as the values are from centuries ago, Kleist's clarity and detailing bring it alive and make it relevant to our here and now. I was entertained and edified. Can't ask for more. (Of interest, maybe: I got to this title via Francine Prose's READING LIKE A WRITER, which helpfully listed books to read to help make one a better writer. Ms. Prose is right to show us what once was. By contrasting writing styles 'back then to our media-influenced style of today, it helps us maybe understand our here and now. Another kibitz: read ATLANTIC Magazine's 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?' (July/August 2008). Whatever google does, reading Kleist does just the opposite.)

These stories by Heinrich Von Kleist give great meaning to the adjective "Kleistian". His prose is almost poetry and every sentence can be a roller coaster of intensity: from the Duke who in the matter of a line or two, goes from being on top of the world, to an arrow "pierc[ing] him just below the breastbone"; from Jeronimo Rugera who is a just about to hang himself in a Chilean prison until a whole city shakes in an earthquake and his fate changes forever. From the Justice of Michael Kohlhaas, to the thieves and miscreants who conspire against the church of St. Cecilia, who are brought to their knees by the power of the organ- these are stories of fate. And that fate comes swiftly and blindsides the reader with confounding emotions and a new insight into a world turned upside down. This work was probably a product of Heinrich Von Kleist's own life of highs and lows, and the brilliance in between. Buy the book, read these stories, you will come away spinning... but enlightened.

Kleist is the great, dark shadow of the German literary world. Born into a military Prussian family, he chose a literary career over the glory, order and ritual of his ancestors. He became a poet instead of an officer. He wandered from city to city, in search of a home, of solitude, a place to cultivate himself and his literary talents. He worried his friends with his demonic thoughts on suicide. He had a morose character and yet he was equally passionate. Stefan Zweig suggested he suffered from being continually extreme in everything he did, "always the superlative". This collection of stories is not to be dismissed. "Michael Kohlhaas" is perhaps the quintessential piece; a tale of revenge and the price of vengeance, it is a universal story, appealing to our earthly desire for an "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth". Kleist creates a world of corruption of conflict. The reader wants revenge for the protagonist but how far can one man go to attain justice? What does he lose, what does he gain? "The Earthquake in Chile" is another disturbing tale. In the wake of a natural disaster, we learn nothing changes the minds and mindsets of people. The earth shakes but the evil of humankind remains deeply rooted. "The Betrothal in Santo Domingo" - One could see it as the companion piece to the above. In a world of war and rebellion, who can one trust? "The Beggarwoman of Locarno" is perhaps the most subtle and haunting of ghost stories. Not only does it revel in the mysterious but it is a morality tale revealing the foibles and flaws of a darkened human spirit. Kleist never became a high ranking officer in the Prussian military but he saw the world falling apart all around him. His stories are a reflection of the dark times he witnessed within his time and within his psyche.

I absolutely refuse to believe that I am the first person to review this book. It being one of the most innovative and (truly) groundbreaking collection of short stories in the German literary canon, and influencing massively such big shots (probably with lots more reviews) as Kafka and Deleuze, you will forgive a little cognitive dissonance on my part. So, that being noted, I'll just reiterate what all the other reviewers have already said: Kleist balances on a fragile strand of (in)sanity that slides lengthwise throughout these stories, not a one of them failing to reinvent the wheel--not only formally but substantively, as it behooves us readers to admit on the double. Don't let the cover fool you either... I did, for a long time, and there should be a dead lady's freaked-out ghost surrounded by three brothers with empty eyes, chanting the 'gloria in excelsis,' all backed by a burning castle with mutilated horses. I'm referring specifically to three stories in this collection---and only three---but there are far more mind-benders, crude and massive explosions of language, and just ouright amazing plots to all of them, that my skimpy comments can do no sort of justice to them. But that's o.k., because you can look at all the other reviewers for more informative responses. Truly disturbing, truly maddening, truly genius. Kleist notoriously blew his brains out in 1811, after shooting another woman in an altogether fitting (yes, fitting...read and see why) suicide pact formed by Kleist in order to stick one last finger up at the world that had robbed him of his "lifeplan" as a rational youth. The world, that is, responsible for his "madness" (yeah right) and these stories, which clearly many of us have taken great pleasure in absorbing. The world, responsible for his funked up play Penthilesia, which Goethe avoided like the plauge, and for which Kleist had to be physically restrained from challenging the man to a duel. If so many people hadn't reviewed this already, I tell you, I may have agreed with him about this absurd world. Thank God he was wrong!