Customer Reviews

Rock Crystal (New York Review Books Classics)

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Stifter is my favorite writer, and to see two of his works in print, and available in the U.S., is, for me, a dream come true. I always check the "S" section in the bookstores to see if anything appears, and now, to my amazement there are two books in print. (This one, and *The Bachelors*, published by Pushkin Press). I like to think I have conjured Stifter.

I have, over the years, acquired about half of Stifter's works in out-of-print English translations. I want to direct people to these books. They can be found through Amazon and other online out-of-print book dealers.

First, some points about Rock Crystal. In the English speaking world, we get Goethean naturalism indirectly, through Wordsworth, then Ruskin. Stifter comes right on the heels of Goethe, and I see Stifter realizing some of Goethe's visions. Rock Crystal is very faithful to Goethe's naturalism. The children are nature-transformed on the glacier. I think of the falling star as an event that marks the conflation of the nature-transformation and the Christian transformation. Naturalized Christianity. The children's distance from the Christian festivities, far below them in the valleys, is a measure of the distance from Christianity that Goethean naturalism has taken us. Stifter is not quite post-Christian, as Goethe & Emerson were, but he is concerned with reconciling Christianity and Naturalism, as his conservative Biedermeier culture retrenched after Goethe's revolutionary forays into nature, which is beyond good & evil. This shadow side of nature leads to the dark side of Stifter's work, least of all in Rock Crystal, which maintains the tone of a simple children's tale. There is a new critical work on Stifter by Helena Ragg-Kirkby, who goes into this dark side of Stifter in great detail. She argues that Stifter was a modernist, far ahead of his time, anticipating kafka. I agree.

MORE STIFTER!!!--->

One needs to know how the German titles are translated.

*Narrenburg*
This early story is translated, clumsily as, "Crazy Castle"
It's available by download now, together with *Maroshely*, which is usually entitled, *Brigitta* (there are many out-of-print publications of *Brigitta*)

*Die Mappe Des Meine Urgrossvaters*
The 1851 translation is available through print-on-demand under the title

*Pictures of Rural Life in Austria and Hungary, Volume I*

*Nachsommer*
translated as *Indian Summer*
the masterpiece, published by Peter Lang (out of print), trans Wendell Frye--god bless him.

*Witiko*
the other masterpiece, an amazing historical novel. Learn what democrats and republicans were like in 1200. The republicans (upper nobles) hunted, partied, and were not too nice to their serfs.
also published by Peter Lang, trans. Wendell Frye

These are translated by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, (out of print--Angel/Dufour)
*Abdias* (amazing, important work)
*Kalkstein* -- trans. *Limestone*
*Waldsteig* translated as *The Forest Path*

In The German Library series #37 German Novellas of Realism, vol. 1, can be found *Granit* (Granite), *Brigitta*, and Stifter's famous Preface to Many Colored Stones (Bunte Steine)

These are translated by David Luke, published (out of print)Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.--->

*Kalkstein* (*Limestone*)
*Turmalin* (*Tourmaline*)
*Der Hegestoltz* (here translated, *The Recluse*, sometimes translated as *The Bachelors*)


*The Recluse* is also avaiilable (out of print) from Cape Publications

That's all I have. I desperately need the rest, but it may not be translated.

[...]

This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. The story is simple: A boy and a girl get lost in the mountains on their way home; it's Christmas Eve, and the two are somewhere in the Alps. What makes the books so unique is the way in which the children's ordeal is described: They are moving through a landscape that is made almost abstract by the snow; this is pure poetry! - Stifter is a forgotten genius of 19th century European literature; I'm glad that his touching Christmas Tale - and ideal Christmas present, by the way - is now available in this beautiful edition!

While this is subtitled "A Christmas Tale", this wonderfully written story is a story of belonging in a small, isolated community - a wonderful gift that is set at Christmas. Two aspects of the story make this a memorable bit of literature: First, the discription of the physical setting and the small details making the village unique, isolated and realistic are superb. Second, the understanding of human group behavior is outstanding - both in the definition of "outsiders" and in the common story required to become an "insider". This aspect is established early and confirmed by the climax of the story.

Excellent writing, excellent control of characters, interesting and simple plot ... well worth your time.

"Rock Crystal" is a simple tale of lost children, their childish courage, their survival and rescue. It's also a tale of a simple close-knit community that responds with humane energy to a possible tragedy and knits together even more closely through realization of shared joys and dangers. The story is set at Christmas-tide but it's very significantly NOT a Christmas story, not a miracle. Christmas is a backdrop, a scrim of shared memories and values among the people of the isolated Alpine valley. The children are resourceful; in a sense, they save themselves by making sensible decisions. Some readers have tried to see a 'divine' intervention in the spectacle of the Northern Lights, which the children behold with awe during their night of exposure on a glacier, but there is no intervention. The spectacle is Nature, already portrayed as awesome and yet material in the rocks and crevasses of the mountain where the children are stranded. In fact, the 'heavenly' display no more leads to their rescue than the glacier meant to mislead them. Humans are subject to the forces of nature, to accident and error, yet they are strong as well, especially in community.

It was a great relief for me to read this classic novella, recommended to me by my trans-Pacific amazonian book sharer. I had just read three long, grotesque novels of thorny Christian symbolism -- Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, Christ Versus Arizona by Camilo Cela, and Voss by Patrick White. All three 'celebrate' the contemptible insignificance of humanity except in abject submission to an angry God. What a relief to find Stifter celebrating humanism and the sublimity of human life, even in a remote cleft of traditional decency in a valley surrounded by titanic peaks and glacial eternities. Stifter is often lumped with German Romanticism, but on the basis of "Rock Crystal", he seems to me to belong with his predecessors of the Aufklärung, the Enlightenment. Read this book when you need a lift, a burst of adrenalin, a glimpse of starlight and a sense of your own worth,

The Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, translated from the German by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, was first published by Pantheon Books, Inc., New York, in 1945, and now republished in 2008 by The New York Review of Books, New York. The book contains an introduction by W.H. Auden who described the book as "a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature." The New Yorker aptly described it as, "A miracle of quiet beauty."

That is what it is: an extraordinarily beautifully written ninety-nine page, 19th Century novella of two children who after visiting their Grandmother on Christmas eve, have to traverse through a high mountain pass in the Alps to return home. They get caught in a blinding, heavy snow storm, making their proceeding with ever increasing difficulty as the temperature falls to a bone chilling coldness. Not being able to see clearly, with tress and rocks indistinguishable in the snow and darkness, they make a wrong turn and get to a point from which they are only able to climb higher and higher. They finally realize that they are lost and in desperate need of finding shelter before they freeze to death as another traveler had some years earlier. The shelter that they eventually find is a combination of large boulders which nature caused to form into a hut, enclosed on all sides but one. There, huddled together, and drinking some very strong coffee their Grandmother was sending home to their parents, they struggled to keep awake so as not to freeze to death. As the snow storm dissipated, stars appear, slowly, one by one, transforming the dark night into a wondrous, magical world of glistening silent beauty. Outside their stone hut they see a glacial field glittering with ice crystal diamonds. After spending a starry night on the glacier's edge, filled with mystery, magic and splendor, they attempt with great difficulty to descend the mountain, resigning eventually to emerge at any point, and then finding their way back to their home village. Although they were able to ascend the night before, descending proved to be almost impossible. They had to constantly turn, ascend again, and then descend only to find again that they had to find another path. The children eventually see a red flag and hear the Alpine horns of their rescuers. They are rescued by their fellow Villagers on Christmas day who assist them to traverse the difficult terrain and descend to a log cabin where they are able to get warm, have food to eat and something to drink, and rest before they continue down the mountain to their home.

What rescues this story from being another typical, banal, overly melodramatic Christmas story is the simplicity of the writing style (it has a grade reading level of 7.8 years, and a readability index of 74.6) and that every sentence, every paragraph is a jewel of exquisite writing, seamlessly interweaving a very realistic, compelling tale of surprising complexity and numerous relationships: that of Conrad and his trusting little sister Sanna; the close family's relationship with their Mother's family; and their family's relationship with their fellow Villagers who treat them with aloofness, as outsiders until fear of the loss of the two children unite all of them in an heroic effort to save them. That is the true gift that the Christ Child has brought to all of them that Christmas.

Some may object to the catholic themes in the book, the descriptions of Christmas as a religious, holy event, others its portrayal of a far simpler way of life than what we experience today in the modern world. Nevertheless, it takes a tale such as "Rock Crystal" to put the reader back in touch with the real fundamentals of life, those most important basic values. I find the book to be a wonderful, refreshing change of pace and an especially fine for Middleschoolers to read, discuss, and enjoy the story; and for them to experience the beauty of an extraordinary writing skill.

Submitted by Richard P. Caro

Some writers have taken a small set of circumstances and through literary skills have transformed the events and characters into something over and beyond the simple story on which the work is based. This is especially true for Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter. This short novella needs to be added to Earnest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea; John Steinbeck's The Pearl; Isak Dineson's Babette's Feast; and A.S. Byatt's Dijin in the Nightingale's Eye as an outstanding short work of literature with reference to the parable style.

The story is simple, much like a folk tale. However underlying the tale are two themes; the theme of what makes a person an outsider or insider to a social grouping and the theme of the power, beauty, grandeur, and threat of the natural world to humanity.

The book is beautifully written. It is masterful with not a word out of place or ill chosen. The descriptions of all characters were sufficient and belabored. The descriptions of the mountains, glaciers, snow storms, and northern lights are firmly grounded in the realistic style with no fantasy or over-statement. Thus the simple story, the simple characters, the threat of nature's unexpected turns, all come together to produce a tiny miniature jewel of a short novel. Only the most skillful of writers could produce so much with so little. Stifter certainly produced a small diamond in his short novel Rock Crystal.

"Rock Crystal" is a simply amazing little book. Adalbert Stifter shows his narrative skill in starting with a description of the Austrian mountains, then moving to a description of two villages in neighboring valleys, then to two separate individuals- a shoemaker in one village and a much-sought lady in another- who eventually become married, and then to the protagonists- the couple's children- Conrad and Sanna. On Christmas Eve, they are to visit their grandmother across the mountain and be back by night. Unfortunately, there is unexpectedly heavy snow and they can't see through it and so lose their way. With not much on them except the coffee their grandmother gave them, they have to rely on Conrad's determination and whatever sign they can find from nature.

One thing that I particularly enjoyed about "Rock Crystal" is how it illustrates that human life can be fragile in the face of nature. Stifter's portrayal of the unforgiving mountains and snowstorm reminds me of the scenery in Jack London's work. Another enjoyable aspect of the book is that, despite the limited space, Stifter builds significant tension and makes the reader feel concerned for the characters; he never pulls any "cheap tricks" to do this, though. Finally, though religious references abound in the book, specifically Catholic liturgical ones, the story does not depend on any particular religious doctrine, and can be enjoyed simply as a story about how lucky we are to be alive.

ROCK CRYSTAL is a semi-precious specimen, indeed -- a throwback to a simpler time, an idyll set in the Alps, a Christmas tale unlike any other you'll read. At 73 pages, it's as much a long short story or novella as it is a novel. And it's anything but complex or riveting. Simplicity is Adalbert Stifter's gambit here because nature is the medium and it doesn't get any more elemental than that.

Two young children, a brother and his younger sister named Conrad and Sanna, take a trip on foot early Christmas Eve morning. They're traveling from their parents' village to their grandparents' in a neighboring valley. When a snowstorm strikes while the siblings are returning home, it's look-out-Hansel-and-Gretel time as they get lost and wind up on a glacier.

The glacier scenes are the key. Here Stifter (through Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Mayer's translation) engages in beautiful descriptions of the ice, the snowstorm, the cave on the glacier, and the nighttime sky. Meantime, he relates what's going on down in the valleys where children are receiving gifts from the Christ child (not Santa Claus in this case). The contrast between the stark beauty (and frightening power) of nature and "civilization" leads to a quiet moral of sorts, as does the ensuing rescue effort.

If you've a taste for tales of simple folk that contain not-so-simple conclusions, this is worth reading. Minor quirks might be as much ascribed to the times as anything else. For instance, the game older brother constantly advises the helpless younger sister who replies, "Yes, Conrad," to his every word. Not like any little sister you or me may know, but that's not the point in this case. The suspension of disbelief is necessary for the Christmas Eve mystery to work its magic. Suspend, then, and appreciate the tale on its own level.

Do not fear that you are buying a book that is too old. I gave it as a gift to a woman of faith and she was enthralled. The style and content are every bit as relevant today as they were when the book was written. This one is a big hit, and you will love it and want to own it.

Adalbert Stifter (1905-1868) didn't live an idyllic life. His father died when he was young, he became a tutor for the rich. He loved a woman for five years only to have her father forbid the union. When he eventually married, there were troubles in conceiving. Liver problems followed him and he slit his throat thus ending his turbulent life.

But of all the German-speaking authors writing in the 1800s, he is the most pleasant, the most picturesque. Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer) is considered by Nietzsche to be one of the best novels of the century, a true Bildungsroman. Stifter was a landscape painter and it shows in many of his writings. (I highly recommend The Batchelors - sometimes translated as The Recluse). He doesn't merely draw a scene, applying image after image until you get an idea. He puts you inside the landscape until you feel you can turn around and see it from every angle.

The Rock Crystal is an engaging little piece. You can read it an afternoon. I can't think of any better book to read in the Winter (I read it on a snowy Sunday morning). The story is simple: two children get lost in a snow storm walking home from their grandparents on Christmas Eve. There is no overwhelming sentimentality, no romanticism, just the simplicity of the scenery, the subtle passing of time. It is true to life without being a dull representation and the results are realistic.

German literature, especially prose, in the 19th century stood in the shadows of philosophy and music. If you want a great introduction to this often overlooked but beautiful world, this is the place.