Customer Reviews

The Best Tales of Hoffmann

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Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm - he changed his name in honour of Mozart, and music was his first and possibly greatest love. He was a brilliant critic, a talented painter and caricaturist and, by all accounts, a very serviceable composer. All these elements - music, the pictorial sense, and the critic's sharp probing intelligence as displayed in the present review - feed into the stories, which perhaps is why they turned out to be his most lasting achievement. The ten in this collection are tales of the fantastic (Hoffmann is also credited by some with inventing the detective story with "Madame de Scudery", not included here, which predates, and may have influenced, Edgar Allan Poe's pioneering efforts in the genre) and include the four which provided the basis for Offenbach's opera. The style, like Mozart's, is bright, energetic and often comic; the substance, as with caricature, mixes the bizarre with the mundane in a fashion quite unlike that of anyone else you've ever read, even among Hoffmann's batallions of readers, followers and imitators. The general effect is strikingly original, often disturbing, sometimes hilarious and, not infrequently, loony - not at all what one would expect from the last of the German Romantics. This volume also boasts several illustrations scrawled by the author, a helpful introduction by E F Bleiler, and Dover Books' usual robust construction and reasonable pricing. Like Lord Dunsany, Hoffmann has been prized more as an influence than a writer. His work has certainly had an incalculable influence on modern fantasy fiction, as well as the detective story, science fiction and the 19th-century "novel of ideas" (Dostoyevsky noted Hoffmann's psychological insight as an influence on his own). But his own best work falls into none of these categories, inventing them all in the service of the author's vision - the mark of a true original, and the best possible reason to read Hoffmann for himself.

E T A Hoffmann was no ordinary man. He started life as a composer and then moved to writing stories. There are several of his sketches reproduced in this book and these show flashes of great talent too (you can see one on the cover). Hoffmann's influence is enormous in the musical world (Tchiakovsky, Delibes, Offenbach, Wagner all drew inspiration from Hoffmann). And there is something timeless in these stories even into the 21st century - there are psychological puzzles, studies of behaviour and myth, stories of automata that Philip Dick, Cordwainer Smith or Isaac Asimov would have been proud of, there are links not surprisingly into the world of music (you mustn't miss 'Rath Krespel') and the world of art (see 'Tobias Martin, Master Cooper'). Somehow Hoffmann makes ancient technologies and methods fresh and exciting - barrel making, sailing, alchemy, mining. Unfortunately the most famous of Hoffmann's stories (Nutcracker) is one of the weakest for me, and the one with the greatest reputation ('The Golden Flower Pot') suffers in this anthology by a translation that didn't engage me as well as those of other stories. My favourite stories are 'The Sand-Man', 'Rath Krespel' and 'Tobias Martin'. Here's a brief quote from 'Tobias Martin' that appealed to me especially: 'It sometimes happens that the deepest sorrow, if it can find tears and words, dissolves into a mild melancholy, so that perhaps even a gentle shimmer of hope begins to beam faintly through the heart.' Hoffmann is often sentimental but this is more than offset by an unpredictable exoticness.

Hoffman is an undiscovered genius - mad perhaps - but definitely a genius. Of course, he was quite well known in the Nineteenth Century, garnering a well-deserved reputation as a writer of bizarre, macabre, gothic tales full of the unexpected and unexplainable. Originally written in German, these tales are mined from the same dark rich earth that gave birth to Goethe and Kafka, Jung and Freud, Hegel and Mesmer - something of a heavy burden to carry.

This volume, consisting as it does of the "best" tales of Hoffman, contains a wealth of eclectic stories peopled with fractured and tortured characters. It includes, of course, the well known story of the Nutcracker and the King of Mice, although your typical ballet lover might find the story a shade darker and more menacing than contemporary stagings of Tschaikovsky: Godpappa Drosselmeier is a somewhat sinister figure, for example. Still, the tale of the Nutcracker is light fare when compared to works such as the Mines of Falun in which a sailor turns miner at the urgings of a shadowy mentor and pledges his soul to the underworldly Queen of the Mine. This tale becomes more and more sinister with the black pit of the mine eventually swallowing the protagonist in a rock fall, exacting revenge on him for falling in love with human woman. The tale ends when his petrified body is recovered 50 years later.

Of course, all is not as it seems in most of these tales. They can be read as fanciful fairy tales - albeit very dark, adult ones - or they can be seen as investigations of the dark areas of the human psyche, at the edge of madness, where vaguely unusual events suddenly become twisted into disturbing patterns. In the Sandman, for example, the bringer of sleep is given a menacing aspect since his arrival heralds a darkening mood in a little boy's parents. The boy eventually learns that his mother sends him off to bed whenever an alchemist visits his father to perform occult experiments, eventually causing the father's death. The little boy grows up, falls in love with an animated doll and eventually commits suicide in the presence of the "Sandman".

Not all of the tales in the book are unrelentingly dark. Some deal with obsession (The Golden Flower Pot), some are love stories (Tobias Martin, Master Cooper) while others are comic and vaguely satirical (The King's Betrothed). Signor Formica, which apparently was written to explain a painting by Salvator Rosa, has not a drop of the supernatural in it while Automata and A New Year's Adventure have it as their epicenters. Rath Krespel, a story about Hoffman's greatest love, music, leads the reader to think there is something otherworldly occurring but eventually all is explained naturally.

A word about the nature of this edition. It contains a lengthy introduction explaining the context of Hoffman's work and some of his themes and sources. Somewhat to my chagrin, the introduction reveals at it very end, that various writers are responsible for the translation of these tales. While this is not so bad, we are then informed that the author of the introduction has translated the translations into modern English, eliminating anachronistic thee's and thou's. So we are really reading a double translation. While this may make the book a bit easier to follow, it is a bit like looking at an airbrushed photo, taken in dim light, of a reproduction painting. Another minor complaint I have is that the cover artwork of is pink and purple and leaves a distinctly cotton-candy feel to what is, in reality, a gathering of dark, angst-ridden, sturm und drang filled episodes.

Still, the stories are mesmerizing, wonderfully inventive, and full of unexpected twists and intellectual challenges. Their archetypes have inspired many operas and still resonate today in movies such as Bladerunner and Edward Scissorhands.

I'm guessing by the meager amount of reviews that E.T.A. Hoffmann is a sadly neglected author in relation to his ability to write marvelously imaginative and entertaining stories. To say this man had a fertile imagination is a gross understatement. Though it might not be apparent on the first impression, all the the stories in this collection contain characters who do double duty as symbolic representations of psychological or sub-conscious forces; the action can be seen as the working out in a protagonist of spiritual or psychological issues; of finding one's true vocation in life, learning to discern reality from illusion, integration of opposing psychic fragments within oneself. But these are no mere simple allegories or one-to-one symbolic representations. They are powerful and gripping works of literature in the form of fantasy and sophisticated fairy-tales. There is more than one way to interpret these tales, and the meaning you find in them will depend on your own personality and preconceptions. If you have ever read any of C.G. Jung's psychological writings, you may experience a distinct recognition of the Jungian concept of archetypes of the personal and collective unconscious. Hoffmann predated Jung by many decades, but was already weaving these concepts into his fantastic tales. Hoffmann not only had deep psychological insights and a fantastic imagination, but had also a talent for conjuring up scenes of delicate and exotic beauty, and in some tales showed a propensity for drollery and satire. In other words, he showed an astonishing range of versatility, even within the category of fantastic fiction. If he sometimes hints at earthiness, he never descends to vulgarity. He is very cultured, but never stilted or stuffy. Hoffmann was also a musical composer of some talent and had an appreciation for great painting as well as clever mechanical devices. All these elements figure into various of his stories and enliven and give them artistic depth. Mythology and the occult also make a prominent appearance there. You will not find fantasy stories being written today that will come close to rivaling the high cultural and literary level of these Tales of Hoffmann. The main weakness that I perceived in some of them was that the 19th century penchant for overblown sentimentality sometimes showed itself, but certainly not to an intolerable degree. I have literally never read anyone like him. If you like Poe, Hawthorne, Doestoevsky, Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Washington Irving - that might be an indication you would like Hoffmann, but those are not necessarily prerequisites. As I said, I really don't know of anyone to compare him to. If you're wary of taking a chance, pick up one of the used offers on Amazon. I did. It's an unbelievable entertainment value for the money. There are 400 pages in the Dover copy I bought. Even though I read mine all the way through at once, these stories should really be savored individually, and that is what I intend to do when I reread them periodically. There is a lengthy introduction by E.F. Bleiler in this Dover edition, but I would strongly advise not reading it until you have finished the stories. That way, you can experience them fresh without any preformed ideas as to their meaning. If you get this book, you have an intriguing appointment with doppelgangers, witches, seven-headed mice-kings, ensorceled nutcrackers, elemental spirits, and men who cast no shadow or show no reflection in a mirror. And that by no means covers everything!

Hoffman's imagination and grasp of the world is simply amazing. He truly knows how to warp any moment into the fantastic and he certainly does it extremely well. Like his music his stories are meant to captivate.