RRP: £11.95
BINDING: Paperback
PUBLISHED: 2000
ISBN: 9780946162734
PAGEs: 240, 2 maps
Theodor Storm
Carsten the Trustee; with 'The Last Farmstead', 'The Swallows of St George's' and 'By the Fireside'
Translated from the German by Denis Jackson; Introduction by Eda Sagarra
‘I value in particular,’ writes Eda Sagarra, ‘two features of Storm’s writing. First, his multiple perspectives, the way in which he seems to invite the reader to look over the shoulder, as it were, of the teller of the story, and judge accordingly. And secondly, his sense of place, his supreme sense that his native region, North Friesland, is as much the centre of the world as was Greece for the storyteller of The Odyssey.’
The tragic title-story and The Last Farmstead depict reversals of fortune in previously prosperous farming and burgher families in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The Swallows of St George’s is an intriguingly told love story from complementary viewpoints. The infectiously high-spirited By the Fireside is a cycle of ghost tales in which a storyteller finally wins over an initially sceptical audience.
‘Denis Jackson has done a great service in providing such fluent, natural translations of these four stories, two of which appear in English for the first time.’– Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement
THEODOR STORM (1817–88) was born in the small North Sea coastal town of Husum, where he established himself as a lawyer and spent almost his entire life apart from fifteen years of political exile. His fifty or so novellas grew out of his lyric verse, which includes some of the finest in the language. His intricately wrought, subtle narratives, strongly rooted in time and place, have long made him a favourite author of his fellow countrymen, and the English-speaking world has begun to accord him a place beside better known writers of other nations whose work has long been accepted as classic.