This is the last in a four volume edition of the early fiction of one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany, a man often called the German James Joyce due to the linguistic inventiveness of his fiction.
Among Schmidt enthusiasts, scholars, and fans, the two novels stand in sharp contrast to one another, the first belonging to his early, more realistic phase, and the second introducing his later, more experimental phase. But the hairs are not worth splitting.
Taking place in 1954, "The Stony Heart" concerns a man gathering documents for a study of a historian, and in the course of his search he gets involved with a woman who is married to a man who is involved with a woman, etc. "B/Moondocks" has parallel stories, one played out in a rural German town in the late 1950s, and the other on the moon in 1980 (the book was first published in German in 1960).
At the heart of both is an absolute commitment to two things: freeing language from its commonplace prose functions, and Schmidt's ongoing savage attack on the German mind-set and attitude that gave us two world wars in this century.
The concluding installment of translator Woods's stupendous four-volume edition of "the German Joyce's" Collected Early Fiction, 1949-1964. Schmidt (1914-79) was a modernist master whose deeply unconventional fiction employs distorted grammar, punctuation, and typography in an all-out effort to render as accurately as possible, and in unedited and uncensored form, the fragmented nature of consciousness. Thus, The Stony Heart(1954) wittily conflates the adventures of historical researcher Walter Eggers as he pursues his scholarly quarry in a rural setting where he makes amazing discoveries about the local landscape ("Drunkards exist among sheep. . .") and short work of his hostess's wavering fidelity to her philandering husband. This novel's intermittent paeans to German literary culture and rude burlesques of Nazism are given more complex, if less immediately engaging form, in (the ingeniously retitled) B/Moondocks (1960), whose narrator Karl Richter's amatory pursuit of his troubled mistress stimulates him to invent a picaresque tale of the colonization of the moon. Both Richter's manipulation of his helpless Hertha and the aggressive sexuality of his mysterious "Auntee Hecta" subtly suggest the lurking presences of domination and sadism in what seems a tamed and reformed culture. Runaway puns and abstruse literary references further ruffle and complicate the surface of a fascinating work whose meanings are well worth digging for. And here's hoping translator Woods is at work on the rest of Schmidt's demanding rewarding oeuvre. (Kirkus Reviews)
