The Best Tales of Hoffmann

Rating:
Summary: Timeless gems
Review: E T A Hoffmann was no ordinary man. He started life as a composer and then moved to writing stories. There are several of his sketches reproduced in this book and these show flashes of great talent too (you can see one on the cover). Hoffmann's influence is enormous in the musical world (Tchiakovsky, Delibes, Offenbach, Wagner all drew inspiration from Hoffmann). And there is something timeless in these stories even into the 21st century - there are psychological puzzles, studies of behaviour and myth, stories of automata that Philip Dick, Cordwainer Smith or Isaac Asimov would have been proud of, there are links not surprisingly into the world of music (you mustn't miss 'Rath Krespel') and the world of art (see 'Tobias Martin, Master Cooper'). Somehow Hoffmann makes ancient technologies and methods fresh and exciting - barrel making, sailing, alchemy, mining. Unfortunately the most famous of Hoffmann's stories (Nutcracker) is one of the weakest for me, and the one with the greatest reputation ('The Golden Flower Pot') suffers in this anthology by a translation that didn't engage me as well as those of other stories. My favourite stories are 'The Sand-Man', 'Rath Krespel' and 'Tobias Martin'. Here's a brief quote from 'Tobias Martin' that appealed to me especially: 'It sometimes happens that the deepest sorrow, if it can find tears and words, dissolves into a mild melancholy, so that perhaps even a gentle shimmer of hope begins to beam faintly through the heart.' Hoffmann is often sentimental but this is more than offset by an unpredictable exoticness.

Rating:
Summary: Fantasia with Automata and Vegetable King, etc.
Review: Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm - he changed his name in honour of Mozart, and music was his first and possibly greatest love. He was a brilliant critic, a talented painter and caricaturist and, by all accounts, a very serviceable composer. All these elements - music, the pictorial sense, and the critic's sharp probing intelligence as displayed in the present review - feed into the stories, which perhaps is why they turned out to be his most lasting achievement. The ten in this collection are tales of the fantastic (Hoffmann is also credited by some with inventing the detective story with "Madame de Scudery", not included here, which predates, and may have influenced, Edgar Allan Poe's pioneering efforts in the genre) and include the four which provided the basis for Offenbach's opera. The style, like Mozart's, is bright, energetic and often comic; the substance, as with caricature, mixes the bizarre with the mundane in a fashion quite unlike that of anyone else you've ever read, even among Hoffmann's batallions of readers, followers and imitators. The general effect is strikingly original, often disturbing, sometimes hilarious and, not infrequently, loony - not at all what one would expect from the last of the German Romantics. This volume also boasts several illustrations scrawled by the author, a helpful introduction by E F Bleiler, and Dover Books' usual robust construction and reasonable pricing. Like Lord Dunsany, Hoffmann has been prized more as an influence than a writer. His work has certainly had an incalculable influence on modern fantasy fiction, as well as the detective story, science fiction and the 19th-century "novel of ideas" (Dostoyevsky noted Hoffmann's psychological insight as an influence on his own). But his own best work falls into none of these categories, inventing them all in the service of the author's vision - the mark of a true original, and the best possible reason to read Hoffmann for himself.