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. ( )

Irreligious, perverse, and shocking even to this day. Von Kleist's discontent with the social structures of his time—most especially the church, the law, and the vagaries of community life—makes his tales perhaps more politically rich than his contemporary Hoffmann, although both are equally skillful in plumbing the depths of the human psyche when it comes to matters of love, survival, family, and even gender.

Von Kleist's style is very proto-modernist: his paragraphs run on for pages with no apparent reason for when they begin and when they end; his pacing is subjectively approached rather than objectively obsessed; and he often begins his stories by telling his reader the endings.

Absurdism runs rampant through these pieces. The title story involves a widowed Marquise who takes out an advertisement in the newspaper, searching for the man who apparently—although she has no memory of this—impregnated her. This kind of illogical and paradoxical situation is at the heart of most of von Kleist's work: "The Earthquake in Chile" turns an exiled pair of lovers into heroic figures in an apocalyptic setting ruled by no seeming authority; however, von Kleist seems to suggest that the imposing orders of the church and the law are so pervasive in their hold on mankind that mankind wreaks the same violence if left with no punitive action from high above.

This is also the case in "Michael Kohlhaas" where the protagonist takes the law into his own hands after repeated attempts to bring legal action against a man who is terrorizing the community. This kind of Kafkaesque critique of the law is also carried out to the extreme limits of surrealism, rendering reality as nightmarish in much the same way Kafka would do later. Of the shorter pieces collected here, "The Foundling" is the strongest and seems to speak to the same examination of reality versus fantasy in Hoffmann's "The Sandman." However, it is in the longer tales that von Kleist is able to enlarge his canvas and allow his oddly distorted syntax and phrasing to loop in and out of sense and nonsense most elegantly. ( )

Kleist is a jolly good writer. "The Earthquake in Chile" was ..interesting. "The Marquise von O" was fractionally less so. I managed 80 pages of "Michael Kohlhaas"..but with another 20 ahead, I decided life is too short..and it's off to the charity shop.
Yes, I see the literary skills embodied by Kleist's bleak look at life's vicissitudes.
But....

Heinrich von Kleist (1777– 1811) was a true romantic, a literary genius on fire with poetic inspiration all throughout his twenties and early thirties, dedicating himself to writing plays, poems, essays, novellas and short stories before ending his life at age thirty-four via a suicide pact with a beautiful young woman suffering from terminal illness. I dearly love each of these dramatic von Kleist tales, however, for the purposes of my review, I will focus on one story from this Penguin collection that has remained with me for years: St. Cecilia, or The Power of Music.

A synopsis of the mysterious events at the heart von Kleist’s tale runs as follows: four Protestant brothers from the Netherlands, in the spirit of iconoclasm, plan the destruction of a Catholic nunnery. Weapons in hand and supported by armed followers, they attend mass held in the convent’s cathedral on a day of Corpus Christi.

During the playing of Gloria in excelsis, the four brothers take off their hats, fall to their knees and touch their foreheads reverently to the ground; all four held in a kind of mystical bliss. The effect of the music is so strong the brothers do not emerge from their ecstatic state; rather, they continue to be held in rapture and thus lose their ability to sense and experience the outside world.

They are eventually taken to the city’s madhouse, where, dressed in the hooded robes of monks, they spend their remaining years in unbroken sublime devotion, sitting around a crucifix positioned on a small table, interrupted only at midnight when they rise to sing Gloria in excelsis. The four brothers live to be very old men, dying in peace and joy.

I have a deep, personal connection with this story I first read when a college student in my twenties, the age of the four brothers at the beginning of the tale. At that time I had one of the most powerful experiences of my life – a vivid dream where I was held in ecstasy by music from angelic trumpets while beholding a glorious vision of heaven. Of course, my experience was much different than the four brothers since my being held in ecstasy lasted minutes not years. But our respective experiences touch on two important points: 1) the brothers and I are not of the Catholic faith, and 2) the unmistakable power of music.

On the topic of music’s power, here is a quote from the nineteenth century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, “The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain. Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.”

Schopenhauer judges music to be the highest of the arts since it expresses the very core of life. And it is no accident the world’s mystical traditions emphasize the importance of music. Ironically, Schopenhauer was an atheist, however his view of music has much in common with many religious philosophers, theologians and mystics, a common ground speaking volumes about how our experience of music can transcend the differences created by various religions and theologies.

But the phenomenon of the four brothers differs sharply from the traditional religious/spiritual/mystical life in one critical way: the mystical experience of the brothers was so powerful that all four were held in its grip every moment for the rest of their lives; indeed, since they were never released, in a very real sense, their blissful devotion was not a matter of their own choosing. This difference cannot be overemphasized.

John Cassian writes about the Abbas and hermits who, following the example of Anthony of the Desert, retreated to the wilderness to live in silence and solitude, devoting themselves to communing with God. Cassian relates the numerous unending challenges these hermits faced, including the noonday demon – depression. But none of the noonday demon nor any of the many other challenges on the spiritual path for the tale’s four brothers.

The second quality of the brothers’ experience worth noting is its communal nature. If such a profound, life-transforming experience happened to one man, well, that could possibly be explained as an individual defect or specific medical crisis. But to have the exact on-the-spot spiritual transformation taking place in four brothers deepens the mystery of von Kleist’s story. And, at least for me, makes this tale unforgettable.


“The kiss and the bite are such close cousins that in the heat of love they are too readily confounded.”
― Heinrich von Kleist ( )

Kleist never really had the chance to become a great, great novelist; this collection shows what might have been had he lived longer, but in each story there is something that doesn't work. In some the idea is not fleshed out, in others, realising that his readers might be growing bored, Kleist inserts elements that are stubbornly incongruous. ( )