Comic, fantastic and grotesque, Walpurgisnacht uses Prague as the setting for a clash between German officialdom immured in the ancient castle above the Moldau, and a Czech revolution seething in the city below. Written in 1917, Walpurgisnacht continues the message of The Green Face, of a decadent society on the brink of collapse and of a Europe past salvation. In it we see Meyrink's exceptional narrative powers at their height.
"a haunting classic" Madeleine Kingsley in She Magazine "An intricate, finely crafted and polished tale, The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague brings magic-realism to the dimly lit streets of Prague. Through the squares and alleys a woman walks, the embodiment of human pity, sorrow, death. Everyone she passes is touched by her, and Germain skilfully creates an intense mood and feel in her attempt to produce a spiritual map of Prague." The Observer Strong on emotion and atmosphere. A very personal view of both Prague and life.
A Jungian box of tricks where nothing is what it seems. The young hero awakes to find himself on a train with Dr Freud from Vienna and the sadistic train attendant Malkowitz. He allows himself to be led off in a skirt on a visit to a nearby castle, where everyone is looking forward to his lecture the next day on yodelling. While researching yodelling, he encounters Adelma...
Father Amaro sours for ever the life of the young Amelia Set in Leira, Portugal in the 1870s, follows the love affair of young Father Amaro with nubile Am elia, and their interactions with Am elia's mother, her atheist suitor, and her mother's lover, the priest Canon Dias.
A tragic love story with a plot like an 18th c Road Movie. Abbe Prevost was a French novelist and journalist. Through his translation of Richardson's work, he introduced English literature into France. He also published a periodical journal besides some novels and short stories.
A companion volume to Simplicissimus: the story of younggirl named Courage, caught up in the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War,who survives, even prospers, by the use of her native cunning andsexual attraction. Completely amoral, she flits through a successionof husbands and lovers and ends her life with a band of Gypsies. Theconceit here is that Courage supposedly tells her story to get back atSimplicissimus, who treats her dismissively in his own memoirs. Thisis a remorseless tale of lechery, knavery and trickery.
Pushkin was the first Russian writer of European stature, and he is among the very few artists - such as Homer and Shakespeare - to have shaped the consciousness and history of an entire nation and its language, thereby affecting the world at large. Eugene Onegin is not merely the greatest poem in the Russian language by its most influential poet: it is a global culture, social and political icon of the highest order. The historical power of this work - a novel in verse - is made all the more extraordinary by the simplicity of its subject. Eugene Onegin is a story of disappointed love. Tatyana falls for the handsome Eugene to whom she daringly makes advances. He cooly rejects her, then flirts with her sister, Olga. When challenged by Olga's fiance, Lensky kills him in a duel, seemingly indifferrent to the grief he causes. (Ironically, Puskhin himself was to be killed in similar circumstances in 1937, some seven years after he completed the work). Onegin leaves the district. When he returns four years later, Tatyana has married another man and it is her turn to reject his advances. But it turns out that Onegin's hauteur is affected: he has always loved her passionately. She loves him too and both reflect painfully on what might have been.
Bruges-la-Morte, which first appeared in 1892, concerns the fate of Hugues Viane, a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. Bruges, the 'dead city', becomes the image of his dead wife and thus allows him to endure, to manage the unbearable loss by systematically following its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion. The story itself centres around Hugues' obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife. The consequent drama leads Hugues onto a plank walk of psychological torment and humiliation, culminating in a deranged murder. This is a poet's novel and is therefore metaphorically dense and visionary in style. It is the ultimate evocation of Rodenbach's lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges.
Cult curio about satanism in fin-de-siecle Paris. Time Out The classic tale of satanism and sexual obsession in nineteenth-century Paris, in an attractive new edition...Strong meat for diseased imaginations (Murrough O'Brien in The Independent on Sunday) This superb new translation by Brendan King vividly recalls the allusive, proto-expressionist vigour of the original.
A novel about the psychology of terrorism set in algiers in 1959. "Entertaining and very nasty, this calculatedly intellectual comedy succeeds well as an unheroic quest starring Philippe, an interesting monster of disarming modesty." The Listener
