I enjoyed it despite the disconnect between Hannah Arendt's blurb on the back cover... "Stifter can be compared to no other writer of the nineteenth century in pure happiness, wisdom, and beauty"... and this from W.H. Auden's adapted NYT review from 1945 that serves as the introduction: "in 1868, ill and discouraged by the public indifference to his two big novels, Nachsommer and Witiko, he cut his own throat."

The novella is delicious in its description of the two valleys high up in the Alps, connected by mountainous col, in which the action takes place, and of the extremely tight-knit and resistant to outsiders attitude of the villagers of Gschaid. Arendt's description of Stifter as the greatest landscape-painter in literature in his time makes sense. A strong picture is conveyed of the village and the route through the forest and mountains the children in the tale will soon take to their grandparent's home the next valley over, which is something like a 3 hour walk. Why are two small children walking alone for 3 hours through the high Alps? Different time and place, that!

The children, Conrad and Sanna, frequently walk from Gschaid to their mother's parents in Millsdorf. Because of this they, like their mother, are not fully accepted as part of Gschaid, showing how extremely insular these people are. It is Christmas Eve, or Holy Eve in this culture, when the story takes place. Unaware of the portents of bad weather (a stream trickling a clear bright blue means much colder weather coming down, which has frozen the ground upstream preventing sediment from falling into the water as it flows... good tip!) they visit their grandparents, have lunch, and set off back home.

On their way back a ferocious blizzard descends, and the children lose their way. They stray high off into the mountain's glacier field and its stark and treacherous terrain. Completely lost, they survive the night and are found the next day by search parties from Gschaid.

The story ends as a parable: having barely avoided tragedy this Holy Eve and Christmas Day, the villagers now fully accept the children and their mother; they are henceforth no longer treated as outsiders. As upright and industrious as these people may have been, they surely could have used a lesson in loving one's neighbors.

To quote Auden again, "To bring off, as Stifter does, a story of this kind, with its breathtaking risks of appalling banalities, is a great feat. What might so easily have been a tear-jerking melodrama becomes in his hands a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature." ( )

This was all landscape and texture; perhaps Stifter's other work���like the out of print Indian Summer, which I've often heard cited as one of the best in the genre of the German bildungsroman���is worth exploring. Rock Crystal was interesting in how the village and its boundaries are sketched, but it was too extended and repetitious in its allegories. ( )

Um conto feliz. Depois de viver nos Alpes seis anos, é-me tudo tão tremendamente familiar!… Imerso no gelo, de onde a história não parece mais conseguir sair. ( )

A lovely small thing - engaging without wringing emotion from the reader. Lots of air for such a short piece. It's an interesting companion for two other books I read this year: Red Snow by Susumu Katsumata - little vignettes about traditional Japanese village life, and The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd - about mountaineering in Scotland.

Bello quando si perdono nel ghiacciaio, c'è la cosiddetta suspance :-) ( )