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balletbookworm's review against another edition
4.0
A great set of pieces to read for sentence construction and stories constructed around themes of injustice.
Of sorts - it's pretty hard to look favorably on plots where women are essentially raped, shunned, and in one case later marry the perpetrator, but von Kleist had some psychological issues so part of that must be chalked up to that and the period of time at which he was writing.
Interesting to note that all his German-set stories take place in the Middle Ages/Renaissance and his contemporaneous-set stories take place everywhere BUT the German-speaking states. At least in these stories.
Of sorts - it's pretty hard to look favorably on plots where women are essentially raped, shunned, and in one case later marry the perpetrator, but von Kleist had some psychological issues so part of that must be chalked up to that and the period of time at which he was writing.
Interesting to note that all his German-set stories take place in the Middle Ages/Renaissance and his contemporaneous-set stories take place everywhere BUT the German-speaking states. At least in these stories.
keekertins's review against another edition
These short stories are sharp, electric and often very tragic
quercus707's review against another edition
3.0
This rating is a compromise. The Marquise of O is one of those stories that, despite one's effort to suspend modern sensibilities, is horrible and incomprehensible -I hated it and found its assumptions upsetting. The Earthquake in Chile, on the other hand, is horrible and completely comprehensible - it shows both the highs and the lows of how people behave in the face of catastrophe.
tom_f's review against another edition
4.0
‘Michael Kohlhaas’ is a bloated and overextended account whose fiery morality gets lost in an initially intriguing thicket of courtly bureaucracy (not surprising Kafka was a fan of Kleist), while I didn’t have the energy to pick apart the racial politics of ‘The Betrothal at San Domingo’ to be honest. Otherwise this is a very satisfying collection of very effective short prose narratives, whose proto-novelistic reportage style was surely influenced by Kleist’s work as a periodical editor. I already knew ‘The Marquise of O–’ from Éric Rohmer’s indispensable film adaptation and was pleased to discover that Kleist’s text is perhaps even more bewitching for being less ambiguous about the human iniquity behind its atmosphere of suspended mystery. Kleist favours tales in which the quotidian is disrupted by the fantastical, whether that be the ultimately mysterious nature of human psychology or the possibility of divine intervention. At the other end of this scale from ‘The Marquise’ is ‘St Cecilia’, probably my favourite story here, which approaches the topic of a miracle from the periphery and aftermath of the event, considering the residual psychological effects of bearing witness to the impossible. In the middle falls ‘The Earthquake in Chile’, a devastating contemplation of the shockwaves of divine caprice sent through precarious societies, undoubtedly influenced by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the tremors it sent through the structures of enlightenment philosophy that Kleist could feel shaking beneath him in his short and troubled life.
ste3ve_b1rd's review against another edition
5.0
I read this book for the first time about 10 years ago; I remember having liked it, but not much else about it. However, Heinrich von Kleist's "The Marquise of O and Other Stories" impressed me enough for me to hold onto my paperback copy. Now having read this collection for the second time, I found all of these stories to be engaging and absorbing; consequentially, I have such renewed respect for this author -- Particularly for the compelling characters that people his work. Regarding Kleist's style: while humour can come into play in these tales [i.e. in "The Marquise of O"] Tragedy is obviously Kleist's forte -- It can be too much to bear. Heavy, harsh and shadowy reality abounds within this author's work; the author's style could be described as gothic [as in "The Beggarwoman of Locarno"]. Kleist's characters are inevitably cursed, or at the very least -- Frowned upon by fate. And if not that, then his evil-imbued antagonists prove to be too strong a match for those "good people" with whom they come into conflict [i.e. Count Jakob Rotbart of "The Duel" brings to mind Shakespeare's "Richard III"]. In "Michael Kohlhaas", the desire to be right / thirst for revenge, combined with bad luck / karma -- Turns the snowballing effects of Kohlhaas' self-sabotage into a fatal downward spiral. Finally, the story that proves to be the most heartbreaking is "The Betrothal of Domingo", which was written in 1811, the final year of Kleist's brief time on the planet; I believe that "The Betrothal of Domingo" actually foreshadows the murder-suicide pact with which Kleist ended his life.
elenareadsalittle's review against another edition
dark
emotional
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
3.0
sebseb's review against another edition
5.0
- best place for opening narrative hooks
- violent anti-Enlightenment vibes
- "tell don't show" prose that straddles folk tale and newspaper reporting
- moral and divine blurriness
- the introduction writer says the magic gypsy fortune-teller ruins Michael Kohlhaas but he's wrong she makes it even better
- srsly who knew early 19th-century magical realism was a thing
- violent anti-Enlightenment vibes
- "tell don't show" prose that straddles folk tale and newspaper reporting
- moral and divine blurriness
- the introduction writer says the magic gypsy fortune-teller ruins Michael Kohlhaas but he's wrong she makes it even better
- srsly who knew early 19th-century magical realism was a thing