Back from London, ill in bed, of all the books I bought I chose Adalbert Stifter, Motley Stones, in order to occupy on the page what I could not occupy outside. I read it in two or three days and then read it again, the fixity of the view outside my window expanded into Stifter's scrupulously described landscapes in 19th century Austria, one pulsing after another, along with snowstorms, hailstorms, fires and floods.
The stories are embedded in the landscape, people are participants in their landscape, their work is elemental, they are shoemakers, dyers, tanners, fullers, they grow food and keep bees, they walk everywhere, know their rocks and their mountains, which streams overflow in a storm. Principal characters often show halfway through the story, or later, as dark interruptions to the Biedermeier charms of the narrators and their families, hairline cracks that turn into full-blown disaster.
Stifter doesn't like commas, nouns run along the rill of the line as if their togetherness matters more than their particularity. He repeats himself often, as if addressing children. Maybe this is comforting to the reduced reader. And peaceful. All is as it should be in the burgeoning bourgeois world, in the manor house, the castle and the trades folk's comfortable houses. At the same time all is not all right. In almost every story there are stranded, shy, reclusive stray folk who cross these lives and send shivers through them. In Stifter's life too, there are dark corners, we assume, a large unhappy man who lived too well after early writing success, who did not achieve anything like the gemütlich family life he often described, and cut his own throat with a razor.
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