BOOK REVIEWS

      I have dispensed with my 'Books of the Year' postings  which covered the years 2009 and 2010, and now attempt to review a selection of books that I have read both good and bad, in editions old and new. Much of what I buy is often based on suggestions by others, or some train of thought that makes me think "maybe I should try..." so they are not necessarily all strange/supernatural fiction.

       With many small press books costing around £35-£40 each, and some seemingly worthy tomes changing hands on the second hand market for many times that, these reviews may also give the potential purchaser some indication of what they might receive for their money. Needless to say, my opinions should not be given any great value as I bring my own foibles to every review and these may change at any time.

Georg Heym

(trans: Susan Bennett)


'The Thief and Other Stories'

Libris 1994
pp105  £5.95

    Georg Heym  (1887-1912) was one of the leading literary lights of  'Expressionism', a short lived movement that arose in early twentieth century  Germany and is now best remembered for its cinema in films such as 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari'.

   Like most movements it had no formal beginnings but many cite Kurt Hillers,  piece in the  'Heidelberger Zeitung' (July 1911) in which he wrote “Those aesthetes who know only how to react, who are nothing more than wax-tablets for impressions, or delicately exact recording machines really do seem to us to be inferior beings. We are Expressionists.”

   Expressionism sought to utilize the often violent inner turmoil of the mind for creative ends and found inspiration in writers such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire and the symbolists as well the emerging science of psychology and the philosophy of Nietzsche.

    Heym's verses are charged with destruction often evoking the spirit of John Martin as in one of his most famous works 'Umbra Vitae' (trans: 'Shadow of Life') (read the poem here)

'Umbra Vitae' (1912)

but in the last year of life he turned this towards prose works. These were posthumously published as 'Der Dieb. Ein Novellenbuch' (Rowohlt 1913), Heym having died the previous year attempting to save a friend who had fallen through the ice while skating on a frozen lake.

    This translation contains all seven of those pieces, and they are just as destructive and macabre as his poetry. Poe's influence is apparent but Heym's voice is very much his own. 'The Thief' of the collections title is the inner battle of the obsessed protagonist as he contemplates and then executes his crime, while 'The Madman', newly released from asylum carries out crimes that would find a later echo in the real life Peter Kurten.

    'The Ship' is probably the nearest we come to supernatural horror, and although this tale might remind one of images from 'Nosferatu' (though Heym is the precurser), his plague figure seems far more tangible if just as relentless.

    We never forget that Heym is a poet, and a man with a mission. His narratives break a lot of heads in their desire to take the reader beyond the dull concensus reality of the everyday: "Some made a delicate sound, they were the thin ones; the childrens' skulls. It was a silvery sound, light and airy like a little cloud. But others creaked like puffballs when he trod on them, and their red tongues flickered out of their mouths, like bursting rubber balls". In 'The Autopsy' this treatment of the body extendeds post mortem as the corpse bears witness to its own dissection. It makes the books finale 'An Afternoon' seem relatively 'normal' in its narration of a brief love affair but death, of a sort, is not far away.

    There is some beautiful dark imagary within the book. A figure in a painting is "sinking back onto the mysterious landscape behind her as though into a veil of green, still water", a road which the hungry look down for food carts  is a "dead intestine" and hours spent in a sickroom bed are heard "trickling down the walls, like the continuous falling of slow drops in the dark hole of a cellar".

    Any one of the stories taken by itself would make the book worth buying, but in combination they represent a huge tour de force. I had to re-read the whole book straight away and they remained just as brilliant second time around. A wonderful and essential text. Buy it from the usual places or here. 

    For those seeking the poetry Libri have an edition of them, which took twenty years of work by translator Antony Hasler to bring to fruition. They are equally brilliant.