From Publishers Weekly
The narrator, Prince Fat Klaus, leads us masterfully through an intensely imagined world in this surprising fable by poet and Gothic expert Wolf ( The Essential Dracula ). His quest is to retrieve Amalanthusa, a princess set on a glass mountaintop by her lustful father. This astounding tale begins and ends in a tower, where Klaus and his rival, hare-lip Fritz, wait out the night, their lives unfolding in stories replete with fairy-tale elements: a "Witch of the Woods," an evil goat, a Persian soothsayer with a riddle. The interlocked stories, all organized around the search for the beautiful princess, are often told to us by other characters. Klaus's controlled irony makes the fable current and immediate: "I was a huge, fat man who had failed to outwit disaster." Themes of passion and loss are authoritatively contained by this incisive narration. The prose moves quickly, hypnotically, Klaus's voice the engine behind it. His steed dies and he observes from the tower "the sound of ravens busy with my horse. Their beaks made a distinct click . . . " Wolf's characters try and fail, often overtaken by erotic longings: violent male characters battle for sleeping, sexualized women. The mechanism of interlocked tales serves the novel's compression: the glass mountain, the witch's woods, the Eastern bazaar--these worlds are superbly crafted in terse, bold, musical language.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
To free himself of an incestuous bond with his daughter Amalasunta, the King imprisons her atop a glass mountain and offers to give her to any man able to reach her. Wolf's psychosexual fairy tale recounts the efforts of two pairs of princely brothers to achieve this seemingly impossible feat. The novel begins as fat Klaus is ending a ten-year search for Amalasunta, whom his brother Hans has freed from her imprisonment. At a remote watchtower, Klaus meets the harelipped Fritz, who has aided his more attractive brother, Baldur, in the same quest. Klaus reviews the events that brought him to the point as he listens to Fritz recount his own tale. Gothic literature expert Wolf was a consultant on the film Bram Stoker's Dracula , with which the book shares many stylistic elements. For larger collections.
- Debbie Bogen schutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Debbie Bogen schutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
