Papa Hamlet

Title: Papa Hamlet
Author: Holz, Arno
ISBN: 9783947325115
Publisher: Rixdorf Editions
Published: 2021
Binding: Quality
Language: English
Condition: New
New from the publisher

Fiction 1314060

Publisher Description:

Fiction. Translated by James J. Conway. Adultery, vulgarity, disordered lives on the brink of collapse: the feverish existence of failed actor Niels Thienwiebel shocked German readers when PAPA HAMLET was first published in 1889. In declaiming the soliloquies of his most famous role, the great Thienwiebel finds delusional refuge from the squalid room he shares with despondent wife Amalie and infant son Fortinbras. But it was the radical style as much as the moral outrage of this novella that so confounded contemporaries. Reflecting their own bohemian Berlin milieu, Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf showed the dream of the self-authored life turning to nightmare through apathy and self-absorption. Originally credited to a fabricated Norwegian writer, PAPA HAMLET signalled the explosive arrival of Naturalism while also pointing ahead to Modernism; its appropriations, irony and play of identity even foretold Postmodernism. Appearing for the first time in English, it is teamed here with an early incarnation of the same narrative by Schlaf alongside further collaborations with Holz. Together their fearless candour and anarchic ingenuity reveal another side to German Naturalism that is well overdue for rediscovery.