Reviews for The Marquise of O and Other Stories

The average rating for The Marquise of O and Other Stories based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-27 00:00:00 Steve Karnya 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

Review # 2 was written on 2019-06-07 00:00:00 James Saksa In this volume the editors have all eight of von Kleist's canonical stories: (which leaves me wondering about the uncanonical stories) The Duel, The Earthquake in Chili, The beggarwoman of Lacorno, The Foundling, The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, St Cecilia or the power of Music, Michael Kohlhaas, and The Marquise of O. The last two of which I had read and reviewed previously. All of this stories were the same and all of them were different. They are the same in striving to drag the reader into extreme emotional states or towards intellectual crisis of faith, the point when your bulkheads rupture, the cold sea waters pour in and you sink in uncertainities and confusion. In all other ways the stories are different. Kleist might be a precursor to Kafka, or you might prefer to see him as the person who was born and brought up at the end of the Enlightenment and fell into an interior crisis that was to end with his suicide in 1811. The shortest story is three pages long, the longest a hundred, two stories are set outside of Europe, three in Germany, three in Italy, some are compact, others rambling shifting their focus of attention as though von Kleist was tempted to re-write The Arabian Nights and tumble from one story into another. I feel what happens in these stories that that the characters beliefs and assumptions, maybe their entire intellectual worlds turn round and remorselessly bite the character on their own arse. The problems that we face are the products of the baggage - intellectual, cultural, social and so on - that we drag around with us. The only thing to fear is ourselves, because that is what destroys us in the end. Perhaps von Kleist's yearning towards extremes and his standpoint was due to a violent encounter with ancient Greek drama, though I believe he himself attributed it to Immanuel Kant. He is at the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic, though Romantic as in Goya's Saturn devouring his son.