Customer Reviews

IN A GERMAN PENSION.

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Within the stories of this collection, which the author considered "immature," there is some great descriptive prose around German characteristics and perspective which can even be said to live on in present Germany. Most impressive is Mansfield's gift in rummaging about in the German psyche. While some of the stories may seem melodramatic, e.g., "The Child-Who-Was-Tired," there are some very entertaining moments in which the author thoughtfully pulls out themes that include sycophancy, overbearance, resignation, mediocrity, selfishness, vanity, truculence, and compunction. For those who love German history and German culture, this is an essential volume.

This collection of short pieces shows early signs of Mansfield's talents, particularly her sense of the absurd and ability to skewer pretensions, but also shows how much she was to develop as an author. Here, she relies too heavily here on stereotypes (the self-absorbed actress, the pompous German) and on painting with too broad a brush.

That said, these stories are amusing in their own right, though definitely not the great short stories she would later write.

New Zealander Katherine Mansfield (nee Kathleen Beauchamp), one of the key modernist authors linked to the so-called Bloomsbury set, said of this, her first commercially published work: 'It was a bad book, but the press was kind to it.'

Well, maybe it's not as bad as she says - and certainly it's a must-have for anyone who's interested in her work - but, when you get right down to it, this is a bunch of stories, the theme of each one of which is "All Germans are stupid and the first person singular Anglophile narrator (Miss Mansfield) is a wonderfully civilised smart ass for pointing it out!"

Well, okay if you say so, Miss Mansfield . . . I don't think! And neither do you, I suspect - not in your literary heart of hearts. Because it's the original date of publication of the book which gives us a clue regarding the kindness that was shown to it by the press: 1912 - just two years before WWI broke out, thanks in part to press jingoism . . . and to anti-German propaganda in bad books like this one.