The life and opinions of the Tomcat Murr: together with a fragmentary biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on random sheets of waste paper
✍ Scribed by E T A Hoffmann
- Publisher
- Penguin Group USA, Inc.
- Year
- 2008;2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 424 KB
- Category
- Fiction
- ISBN
- 0141937319
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
It was E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776 --1822) who first explored many of the themes and techniques which were later used by writers from Dickens to Dostoyevsky, Poe to Kafka, Baudelaire to Marquez. His career reached a glorious climax in The Tomcat Murr , perhaps the strangest novel of the nineteenth century.
Hoffmann was a follower of Cervantes and Sterne, a pioneering 'magic realist', fascinated by Gothic horror, extreme mental states and supernatural events occurring within sharply (and sometimes satirically) rendered social settings. A talented composer and painter, he portrayed himself in the guise of the hypochondriac, antisocial and moody but brilliant musician Johannes Kreisler. In this astonishing book, a vain and very bourgeois tomcat sets out to write his memoirs, using a biography of Kreisler as a blotting pad. By a printer's error, the two lives get spliced together into a bizarre double narrative. A supreme example of literary bravado, _The Tomcat...