Jean Paul (1) (1763–1825)

This is not a review. This is therapy.

Concerning the easy and uninterrupted flow of reading, this book is the next thing to a medieval drama in Sanskrit for a sophomore. Unless one is extremely well provided with the currency of names and ideas of the late Enlightenment, one feels like a very soft worm inside a huge rock of fossilized notions.

JP stretches syntax to a point of complete entanglement. While he warms up, reading his sentences is like playing snake, enjoying those little snacks of sense, growing, feeling your brain move, unfurl, until the next zeugmatic splash and crumble. Every sentence is a speleological expedition, with the guide getting agitated and hurriedly rounding a corner with his torch somewhere ahead, leaving you in the darkness, and although in the flare he seems to be floating, I think I heard him stumble a couple of times. Where Jean Paul stumbles, I lay in a heap of rubble.

He makes Gargantuan leaps with you on his shoulder, now head over the clouds with most of the landscape obscured from view, now merrily plunking his arse into a muddy puddle, now composing strange poetry he calls polymeter, now hurling at the reader sordid double, triple, quadruple entendres and mixing his metaphors into thick indigestible verbal dough.

I lived with him for at least half a year like one lives with an unexpected noisy relative, who keeps his shampoo in your fridge for some obscure and highly mutable reason, and wants you to cheer up and party when you are exhausted and want to lie down and drift away with a solid good book. I pushed him through 550 pages with his bloating smorgasbord of inconceivable possessions and out into the abyss of the long cold afterword and I miss him so much I could cry.… (mer)

A story of love and friendship, of foible, revenge and vanity told with quiet humor and numerous digressions in Jean Paul’s inimitable language encompassing empathy and satire. The text of this edition follows Jean Paul: Werke in 2 vol., Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 1973 and leaves out interludes which Jean Paul inserted some time following the first edition of 1809. The drawings by Paul Scheurich (taken from a 1912 edition) caricature the story with a smile. To my knowledge this work has never been translated into English; I am not astonished: an impossible task to re-create a translation that comes anywhere near the original. You either love or hate Jean Paul’s writings. To Goethe and Schiller they remained an alien world, I treasure them. (VI-16)… (mer)