A flying black beetle got in and stunned itself on the light bulb, then lay on the floor scrambling and unscrambling its legs, as I was reading in the middle of the night. The Bachelors by Adalbert Stifter is a coming-of-age tale from the mid nineteenth century. Victor, an orphan, fostered by a sweet woman in a country cottage, at his uncle's command walks to visit him, several days across the land of orchards and mountains, under achingly blue skies, to the island in a lake where his uncle has lived as a recluse for many years, and our young man stays for several weeks as a virtual prisoner. The story unfolds like a state of familial siege from which one slowly breaks free. You know the crusty uncle will relent, and the clean young man will stay clean through thick and thin, grow every day more honorable and fit, and marry sweetly when the time comes, as his uncle had not been able. Adalbert Stifter died by his own hand (a razor to his throat) when he was sixty-three. He was not able either. Which makes The Bachelors an even sweeter, more impossible and desirable book.
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