For the second in my short story summer, I decided to read a collection of stories written by someone born in the eighteenth century, who published until a death from syphilis in 1822. ETA Hoffman was a German writer, probably best known for a story which was turned into The Nutcracker. He was also a musician who worked around operas and the stories in this collection have an operatic bigness, but a strangeness all his own.
The collections kicks off with a banger, ‘Mademoiselle de Scudery’, which is about the historic author of Amadis the Gaul, who is embroiled in a murder mystery where she must determine a man’s guilt and plumb the depths of madness - just add The Doctor and some aliens and it’d fit Doctor Who perfectly. Scudery is not much of a detective, she actually makes things worse in her attempts to help. The beginning is wonderfully striking, a desperate man banging on the door but being turned away because his desperation makes him terrifying. As a reader, I knew a huge mistake was happening but could do nothing to change it. The city of Paris has been recovering from a well-connected poison gang and is now reeling from a gang of people murdering young men bringing jewellery to their lovers.
The solution to the mystery is really interesting. Scudery had been introduced to Rene Cardillac, an eccentric goldsmith who has trouble letting go of his magnificent creations. It’s revealed that Cardillac is the lone killer. His passion for gold and jewels so strong that he can’t let anyone else have them, so kills his customers and steals back the goods. It’s an explanation that is both extreme in its psychological darkness and vaguely plausible. The collection is started with one of the strongest stories.
The next, ‘The Sandman’ is about a man who has childhood nightmares of a figure that comes to his house when he is asleep and makes his parents upset and nervous. He calls this figure the sandman and, one day, peeps in to see him. It’s then described that the Sandman tears of his limbs and boils out his eyeballs - but this can’t be true in the more grounded reality of the book. Certainly his level-headed fiancee, Clara, doesn’t believe it.
Then the plot moves the man to a city where he falls in love with a strange woman, beautiful and precise, short of words but oddly stiff. It turns out she is an automaton, essentially a clockwork robot, and it’s connected to the Sandman somehow. It’s a weird, brooding story, full of odd mentions of eyes. It would seem the story as a connected series of events only lives in the protagonist’s head, that he’s strung together odd moments of his life and created a whole nightmarish concoction.
‘The Entail’ started off as a full on gothic, with more flowery writing than the other stories. A castle stands in a wasteland near the sea, surrounded by ‘storm-proclaiming seagulls’ where the owner only visits once a year. It’s a place of dark secrets and ghostly re-enactments of them. The cause of the whole problem is an entail, a legal contract about who the castle goes to, and the story gets snarled up by the ins and outs of it, leaving it weaker than it started.
‘Doge and Dogeressa’ is a story I knew a little about. I’ve been to the Doge’s Palace and seen where Martin Faliero’s portrait has been covered up. Hoffman weaves this story with hints of witchcraft and almost fairytale like elements, where a penniless rower with a mysterious past is weaved into it. It’s a little less intense than the best stories in the collection but entertaining.
‘Mines of Falun’ is a sort of reverse Ancient Mariner, with hallucinatory descriptions of a mine being like the sea, haunted by the Queen of the underground and piling on the dread. It’s based on the true story of finding a man buried by a mine collapse 50 years ago and his body being preserved by the airlessness but Hoffman adds levels of folklore and madness all his own.
‘Arthurhof’ and ‘The Choosing of a Bride’ were probably the weakest stories in the collection. The first doesn’t have the intensity of the others and without ‘Doge and Dogeressa’s’ interesting history. I found ‘The Choosing of a Bride’ to be a random collection of events with very little causation. It was a shame it was the last story in the book because it left me feeling lukewarm about the collection, a feeling that faded as I remembered all the brilliant stories.
My favourite story is ‘Councillor Krespel’. It’s not the most satisfyingly constructed of them, it’s essentially half build-up and then half explanation, but something about it gripped me. I loved Krespe; with his sing-song voice, strangely constructed house (apparently something the real Krespel did) and habit of taking violins apart. There was also something brilliant about the secret at the heart of the book not being a villainous one, but one drawn from love and care (if a little smothering). I found it so fascinating that his daughter’s genetic condition leaves her with the most beautiful voice in the world, but also leads to her death if she sings - and that he dissected the violins to find similar flaws. The images and ideas really linger.
I very much enjoyed this collection of stories, most of them being perfect drops of story that conveyed the full satisfaction of a novel. It wasn’t like some short story collections which seem like auditions for future novels, or ones where they seemed to be just moments, but were fully constructed and decent stories. I don’t know much about Hoffman, but if the stories are anything to go by, he must have been an interesting person, these stories are so full of madness, romance and feelings too big to contain. Strange his other works are about a nutcracker and a tomcat.
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