Volume 28, Number 3 · March 5, 1981
Devil's Brew
By Robert M. Adams
The Egghead Republic: A Short Novel from the Horse Latitudes
by Arno Schmidt, translated by Michael Horovitz, edited by Ernst Krawehl, edited by Marion Boyars
Marion Boyars, 164 pp., $12.00
Evening Edged in Gold
by Arno Schmidt, translated by John E. Woods
A FairytalefArse, 55 Scenes from the C ou/untryside for Patrons of Er ra/o Helen and Kurt Wolff Books/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 215 pp., $74.95
By a bitter bit of mistiming, Arno Schmidt, who died in 1979, has now become at least partly accessible in English. On the evidence, he was an enormously important talent in the fictional line of cruel comedy that runs from Rabelais through Swift and Joyce—or to say it straight out, a 'Major European Novelist.' It's a shame that we are learning about his career only now when it's over; all the more reason, then, to blow the untimely trumpet. He was a very great writer; we should have known his work sooner.
Review, 2472 words
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