http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/8099536...Adalbert Stifter suffered from anxiety and depression his entire life. Like so many writers, he depended on the approval of others and despaired over the public indifference to his novels. Obviously, his own character was one that could not overcome this perception regarding his own inadequacies. He took this public refusal of his life’s work so personally that his last act on earth was to unfortunately cut his own throat. This is a fiction, but all of us bring something of ourselves to the reading of any text, that is, unless we are dumb to the ways of the heart and our own human impulses. What matters to many of us at specific and certain times, for others matters to none. Within the law, I myself am naturally a hardened, cold-blooded murderer. Like a farmer tending to his flock and crops I do what must be done to extricate and eradicate in order to protect the better interest of all I am charged with safekeeping. It helps a human to be hard when it entails a violence unbecoming of a man so closely attuned to nature. Death is simply a matter-of-fact and nothing one needs to dwell on. But when children are involved this sometimes frozen heart of mine thaws to a degree baffling to the ears of those who know me and who hear me babbling in my pleading cries for mercy. And I, who have never been a lover of young children, even my own, rise to their defense and protection like no other. It puzzles even myself this manner in which my overwhelming and compassionate emotions seem to exflunct my long-hardened stance. My posture severely bends in the doubling over of my agony, and I wish the present experience had never occurred or would quickly end. Much has been praised about this fine little book Rock Crystal. In addition, there have been others who cannot bear the seeming pretense of this labeled prim and human-caring spectacle. I understand this latter position better than my own. But what is important I think to note is how, through our many years, we all do change. Everything looks different from an altered or, it is hoped, an evolved point of view. Our tastes in food, music, and literature are good examples of this, not to mention our specific needs for sex and meaningful relationships. If one lives long enough the important lesson learned is that all of life changes all of the time. It is true that everything is in flux in this world ruled by utter chaos. What seemed to me at first to be a very brief encounter when taking a peek at the total ninety-six page count actually resulted in more than seven days of reading time. My sessions were only good for a very few pages at each seating. So descriptive were the geographies and social sciences that I struggled at times to absorb them all. It was almost too much. Early on I was asking the author for the point of his story. But it did not take me long to realize in fact that Adalbert Stifter was very good at this craft of writing. I committed to continue in my struggle, and to march on through his text to see what I might see. Unlike a few critical others, the name Adalbert Stifter interests me to no small degree. I have wanted for some time now to read his work just because of that remarkable and mysterious name. I believe in the threat of danger involved in just viewing the face of the name’s own landscape on this page that claims the name of Adalbert Stifter.Crazy as it sounds, I suspect in some ways this novella may be misconstrued again as a type of Christian tale because it more than once invoked its name. I think it instead makes a statement relatively more inclusive to all humanity and the brilliantly glorious and fantastical wonders of our world. For me, a literary vehicle coursing through the streaming blood that comes from the violent death of one Adalbert Stifter, a gruesome murder bloodied by his own hand, this tale bravely mounts itself in its own way indifferently onto his fiction. And is as well proof of his own denial of a god’s commandment stating thou shan’t kill. Literally, this book was an amazing effort he made in making me see, and for that world of his I entered and that person I am who in this case allowed himself to be written upon, I am quite grateful.
Who am I kidding? I'm not going to finish this thing. I'll get more enjoyment by just staring at the cover lovingly, stroking it with the tippy tip-tops of my fingers, and saying aloud, 'Pretty!' in the voice of an idiot manchild. This isn't the case of a book deserving a good cover; this is the case of a cover deserving a good book... and this just ain't it.I should have taken the author's name as sufficient warning. I mean, what the hell does an Adalbert Stifter have to tell me? He sounds like the kind of man who should do surveying for topographical maps or who should teach philology in Vienna while scowling at his students, who watch his old worldy muttonchops -- minute by minute, day by day, fortnight by fortnight -- devour his anemic, skull-like face. That's my impression of an Adalbert Stifter anyway.Should I admit to you that this book is only seventy-five pages long? And that the typeface is relative large? And that the line spacing is generous? And yet I still couldn't bring myself to finish it?I had the best of intentions. I would think to myself:Okay. Now I am really, really, really going to sit down to read Rock Crystal. Yes! I am very pysched about reading a bunch of scrupulous descriptions of the trees, the valleys, the mountains, the shrubs, the streams, the leaves, and the socioeconomic milieu of two Alpine valley communities circa the first half of the 1800s. Won't that be fun? I'm sooooo going to park my keister and enjoy the living shit out of this {allegedly} serene, moving yuletide story of two Hanselesque and Gretelish siblings who get lost in the woods on the way home from visiting their Grams and Gramps. Yes I am. I really am. I completely am. In two minutes I'm gonna go get that book and read the fuck out of it. I can't wait. It's gonna be, like, a totally transcendent experience. Or something. I am having so much fun thinking about all the fun I'm going to have reading about the father's shoemaking business and why the townspeople prefer his shoes to anyone else's. Even Aldo's. Yes. Any minute now I am going find myself so tempted by this beguiling, charming tale of two lost imps that I'll desperately crave a hasty return to those Bohemian villiages. In fact, I'll never want the story to end. Ever! I mean, look at the cover... It's so icy and pretty. It's reminds me of Marlon Brando's crystalline tract home on Krypton in the first Superman movie. Or an Apple store. Something clean, crisp, cool, refreshing. Like a glass of Perrier with a so-thin-you-can-read-through-it slice of cucumber in it. That's what this book is like. And that's why I can't wait to get back to it. I don't even care if I have those two new DVDs waiting to be watched. They're probably not good anyway, right? They're surely not about a pair of Lederhosen-wearing scamps yodeling their way through the Alps on a heartwarming Christmastime trek. What could be better, really? Books like this lift me up to a higher plateau of consciousness. The penthouse of consciousness, you might say. Ten more minutes, and then holy shit... am I ever going to read the fucking fuckety fuck out of that book! I am very, very, very, very excited. Whoohoo! (I wonder if The Biggest Loser is on...)So -- SPOILER AHEAD -- the kids get lost but, unfortunately, they don't die. (I read the introduction. That's how I know.) Death would have really added something to this novel, I think. Violent death? Even better. This thing was just way too prim, starchy, and antiseptic. I imagined the author wearing a pince-nez and long gloves and using a cigarette holder while he wrote it. It's almost as if a dewy-eyed Hegel (in secret) tried his hand at novel-writing and the manuscript were found long after his death by... I don't know, Susan Sontag or someone who wrote their jacket blurb before they had even bothered to read the damn thing.
Do You like book Rock Crystal (2008)?
Totally agree. I thought I was the only one: most friends on here love this. I found it quite banal and even boring. Nice to know I'm not totally in the minority on this one!
—Hadrian
Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, illus. Josef Scharl (Pantheon Books, revised 1965 edition)Rock Crystal: A Christmas Tale by the Bohemian-born Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) was a novella marked by purity of prose, naturalism, and portents. It was first published in the original German in 1843, and appeared in translation, by Elizabeth Mayer and the poet Marianne Moore, a century later (1945). Despite the onset of holiday cheer that pervaded the start of the tale, the reader could detect that something would go wrong.Among the high mountains of our country there is a little village with a small but needle-fine church spire. Conspicuous above the green of abundant fruit-trees, this spire—because the slates are painted vermilion—can be seen far and wide against the faint blue of the mountains. The hamlet nestles in the very center of a fairly wide valley that is an almost perfect ellipse. Besides the church, a schoolhouse and a parish house, there are a few stately homes around a square with four linden-trees and a stone cross in the center.... In the valley and scattered along the mountain-sides are many little huts of a sort common to such regions—whose inhabitants belong to the village.... Even more distant huts, hidden away in the mountains, cannot be seen from the valley; the people rarely come down among their fellow-parishioners; often, indeed, are obliged to keep their dead with them over the winter till they can bring them to the valley for burial after the snow has melted.The above passage was clipped from the extended opening of the book, a slow sequence of scenes that gradually expand to contain the traditional Christmas festivities, culture, natural cycles, social structure, and topography of the village of Gschaid and its neighboring village of Millsdorf. The way the passage culminated on the fact of the dead staying at home for the long winter signalled a dark tone to the fable-like simplicity of the tale. The landscape and mountain communities were exquisitely evoked in sinuous sentences. Something had to upset the balance of beauty.It took some time of lingering on the natural and cultural landscape before the story alighted on the central characters and story line. A shoemaker from Gschaid married a dyer's daughter from Millsdorf. They had a son and a daughter. Something happened on Christmas eve that will affect the whole family's relationship to their extended family and to the whole community.Although the background of the story was Christian, a valuable lesson imparted by this fairy tale for adults and young adults was not wholly religious but of the universal human variety. It was partly about how a time of crisis or calamity became the very thing that could make a community realize that everyone is equal in grief. Nature could teach a tightly knit community to accept people who were from another place, outsiders who were different from them in several respects.This is a heart-winning story that could leave a lump in one's throat. The prose was rock crystal clear. It could render something out of nothing, like the following description of silence which had the concreteness and precision of poetry:They stood still, but heard nothing. They stood a little longer, but there was nothing to be heard, not a single sound, not the faintest except their breathing; indeed, in the stillness reigning, it was as if they could hear the snow falling on their very eyelashes.(also posted in my blog)
—Ryan
The simplest and most concisely and carefully written work I've read in some time. Rock Crystal revolves around Conrad and Sanna, two young children who get lost in the mountains on their way home from their grandmother's on Christmas Eve, right in the middle of a terrible snowstorm. Stifter doesn't present this as a gripping melodrama, but more of a simple story of man (though a more innocent pair as opposed to one of experience) vs. nature, and the more loving remembrance of nature having managed to overcome it for now. Stifter is clearly trying to make the story as short as possible, and in 75 short pages you really get to know the customs of Christmas, the customs of the these small mountain villages, the landscape (with beautiful panoramic descriptions), this family, and the peril that the kids go through. It's a marvelous feat and being able to tell so much with so little, and some of the naturalistic descriptions are painfully lovely (and even, in regards to the constant mention of silence and darkness, kind of terrifying). It becomes clear that Stifter is more interested in writing more of a folktale or parable as opposed to a more tense and plot driven narrative (even the dialogue between the children, where Sanna usually simply says "Yes, Conrad" or other variations strips these two of any real characteristics), and it makes the novella more successful as it manages to avoid cheap drama. This was a nice find, especially right before Christmas.
—Eric
