The Devil’s Elixir

4 Responses to The Devil’s Elixir

1. Mr Green says:

   April 14, 2019 at 7:24 pm

   200 years on, it is perhaps difficult to imagine how transgressive (even though not wholly original – cf Lewis’ The Monk) this novel must have seemed to the early 19th century reader with a protagonist – Brother Medardus – a Capuchin monk who turns from a life of religious devotion to one of lust, mendacity and murder.
   But the story is both confused and confusing as well as repetitive (although it was sometimes hard to tell). Writing was not Hoffmann’s day job, but any idea that he was a better composer than writer is swiftly dispelled by listening to the appropriately occasional broadcasts of his compositions.
   His enduring artistic contribution is rather to the creations of others, notably Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann and which suggests that he was at his best in shorter forms of literature where his imagination was not compromised by a need for structure …

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2. Mr Red says:

   April 20, 2019 at 7:05 pm

   The book was somewhat disappointing: a compendium of Gothic clichés, – Doppelgänger, monks, murder, madness, religion, pacts with the Devil and so on. Hoffman apparently wrote the story very quickly and did not revise it, or he might have removed some of the repetitions and obscurities. As a piece of German Romanticism, interesting to the historian, less so perhaps to the ordinary reader. I read it in German, which was an interesting experience – it seemed rather stilted to me, but then I’m not familiar with German fiction from the early 19th century.

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3. Mr Black says:

   April 25, 2019 at 9:46 pm

   Way too long, but there were some good characters and I’m sure that when it was written the content was far more shocking than today. Not a keeper – a good candidate to ‘book tip’ at a Hay on Wye book shop….

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4. Mr Orange says:

   April 25, 2019 at 10:57 pm

   Overlong, bonkers nonsense which reads as though the words were puked onto the page by a drunken student of gothic fiction. I suspect it would not have improved, if I had read it in Greek.

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