The Lord Chandos Letter

This little book is rather difficult to review, for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that what are called the "stories" herein are not really stories at all in the common sense of the word but rather haunting, oneiric vignettes which end as abruptly as they begin - To call them impressionistic would be not only an understatement, but not quite right. - All the characters limned here live in a sort of dreamworld always accompanied by that indefinable, unlocalised sense of dread and foreboding one has in a dream. Thus, sometimes it seems to come from a well, or a barrel, or a golden apple or, in two instances, an encounter with a sort of doppelganger. It's as if the author had discovered some subaqueous realm lying just under normal sense experience and described it with the acute realism of Chekhov (of whom the intense detail in the stories reminded me) combined with the inner horror that Poe expresses at his best...except Hoffmannstahl expresses it better, but he couldn't bring himself (apparently) to complete a story of the kind that Poe wrote. Rather, we have these numinous dream-sequences filled with unnamable dread. It's as if, as Gerard De Nerval wrote of himself shortly before he committed suicide, the dream world was taking over "reality" in the author's mind, or, rather, has taken over.The "letter", tacked on to the end of these stories, supposedly explaining them, is interesting, but really doesn't tell us anything we can't glean from the stories. It's a manifesto of sorts, basically stating (and I simplify here) that language is incapable of explaining the numinous.Hoffmannstahl was something of an expert on light, and some of his best descriptions involve the effect of the lighting that lends a scene its all-encompassing "aura". In this, he very much reminds me of Emily Dickinson. I was constantly reminded while reading of her lines:A certain slant of light-Winter afternoons-Oppresses with the heftOf cathedral tunes.Well, I shan't go on. I'll leave the prospective reader with a quote from the narrator of "Tale of Two Couples" to give him/her and idea of what to expect:"I walked along like someone in a dream who is being touched by the atmosphere of his life and by the suspicion that he is dreaming." P.112This is the effect throughout the book on the reader.Only four stars because it seems to me that Hoffmannstahl fails to give us anything but a dreamy patchwork of vignettes that lack any sort of meaning or continuity save in these oneiric, numinous flashes of dread and insight.....But, what blinding flashes they are!

I came across Hugo Von Hofmannsthal in Stefan Zweig's brilliant autobiography, The World of Yesterday. Zweig pulled me into the very earliest decades of the 20th century Vienna. In one short section he discussed how impressed he was hearing Hofmannsthal at a reading. Zweig, the younger of the two, in short time surpassed Hofmannsthal and became the best selling author in Europe in the 1920's and 30's. Impressed myself with Zweig's writing, I set out to see who he had been impressed with at that time in his life. The reviews of this collection do an admirable job in describing these short stories. I will add that most of them provide a lasting impression, and that upon seeing the title of each story again, one cannot help but recall some imagery. A worthy addition to my library.

Excellent performance in the service

A great book for your private library

I'll just add a little to Daniel Myers's review. These stories have long been classics of modernist literature, and they should be read by everyone interested in the history of Symbolism, the heritage of Poe, the history of fantasy fiction, and the development of what Robert Musil called "daylight mysticism" (that's in his "Posthumous Papers of a Living Author," also on Amazon).What I'd like to add to Myers is that "The Lord Chandos Letter" is a very important text in the history of modernist mistrust of words. It plays a central role in Enrique Vila-Matas's "Bartleby & Co." (also on Amazon), a novel about people who have given up writing. George Steiner has written about "The Lord Chandos Letter" in "Real Presences.""The Lord Chandos Letter" describes the author's mistrust of all words -- he is given to personal, incommunicable, "sublime" experiences, which can be set off by all kinds of small events: a water beetle rowing across the dark surface of water in a rain barrel; rats dying on the floor of a dairy barn, writhing in the lethal atmosphere of the "sharp, sweetish-smelling" poison; "a moss-covered stone," and "all the shabby and crude objects of a rogh life." In other words, he is no longer moved by the grand, beautiful, pompous, public displays of ordinary life, but only the forgtten, mislaid, overlooked, trivial, "meaningless" things that other people fail to notice. The story is fundamentally about what might still have religious meaning -- although he calls the effect "sublime," not religious. And whatever is genuinely religious must also surpass language.

In the supreme example of High Modernist irony, Hofmannsthal eloquently explains why he can no longer communicate. He is an exemplar for Kafka, Borges, Joyce, everyone.

Fantastic collection of stories. "The Letter" is remarkable.