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Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

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This (long) novella was originally published in 1832, as Romanticism was receding, but it shares many of the genre's characteristics. There are masked balls, Counts and Countesses, impostors, gypsies, wasting deaths.... Moerike deliberately chose to call Nolten a "painter" rather than an "artist" to keep matters on a more human scale, and art plays only a small role here. Moerike sets up a number of pairings: Nolten and another painter, the two women he has feelings for (even his desire to form a relationship with a Countess is mirrored by his fiance's half-formed desire for another man), an actor and a half-crazed "fishy man"--both of whom try to do Nolten good by impersonating him in different ways. This is both a Bildungsroman and a novel of Fate, and fate here takes the form of different kinds of balancing--whatever good someone tries to do is most often balanced by something negative that comes of the same act, so events have the inevitibility of tragedy. The translation preserves the archaic language of the period, but it isn't offsetting. The narrative, while disjoint (and suggesting at different times modern metafictionist writers and even Raymond Roussel in impossibly-detailed descriptions of art works), is surprisingly engaging. If you read it more than once, all the ties, pairings and balancing-out will be clearer. A very interesting book.