Papa Hamlet (Paperback)

Paperback. 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.Fiction. Translated by James J. Conway. Translation of the novella Papa Hamlet by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf, originally issued in German in 1889, along with The Paper Passion and A Death by the same authors and A Garret Idyll by Johannes Schlaf. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.