RRP:  £9.95
BINDING: Paperback
PUBLISHED: 2017
ISBN: 9780946162925
PAGES: 144
Paperback original

Theodor Storm

Grieshuus: The Chronicle of a Family

Translated from the German by Denis Jackson; afterword by David Artiss

The sixth and final title in Denis Jackson’s definitive series of translations of Storm’s finest novellas is a new translation of a long overlooked late masterpiece, Grieshuus: The Chronicle of a Family. It is the story of the decline and extinction of a noble line, which arises from the enmity between two brothers. Events take place in a remote, wolf-ridden corner of the northern German duchy of Schleswig, in the midst of an international power struggle – the devastating Northern Wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fought between the rulers of the expanding Swedish empire and coalitions of other European powers, from Denmark and the Low Countries to the Russia of Peter the Great.

The structural subtlety of this spacious novella, involving two separate chronicles inside an overarching narrative framework spanning several generations, foreshadows that of Storm’s celebrated masterpiece The Dykemaster (Der Schimmelreiter).

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.

DENIS JACKSON’s other selections of Storm’s novellas published in Angel Classics are A Doppelgänger; with ‘Aquis submersus’; Carsten the Trustee, with ‘The Last Farmstead’, ‘The Swallows of St George’s’ and ‘By the Fireside’; The Dykemaster (Der Schimmelreiter); Hans and Heinz Kirch, with ‘Immensee’ and ‘Journey to a Hallig’; Paul the Puppeteer, with ‘The Village on the Moor’ and ‘Renate’ (Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2005).