Simplicissimus (Rev)

by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, J. J. Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Johann Grimmelshausen

Book Overview

Mike Mitchell's new translation replaces S. Goodrich's 1912 version of the first German bestselling novel. Simplicissimus is the eternal innocent, caught in the middle of the Thirty Years War.

The novel follows a boy from the Spessart named Simplicius in the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War as he grows up in the depraved environment and joins the armies of both warring sides, switching allegiances several times. Born to an illiterate...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1903517427
• ISBN13: 9781903517420
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Dedalus
• Length: 433 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

The Great Bildungsroman of World Weariness

This book captured me from the first page and as I read chapter after chapter, I was delighted, impressed and taken in to a world that is both far away in setting yet close to heart and mind. On the outside, this book is about a boy becoming a man through the various trials and errors of life. There is the Bildungsroman element here (Bildung - building up or 'growing up', roman - novel) He is the pure fool, the original innocent, looking for guidance. He goes from his parent's farm, to the hermit's hut, to the courts, to the battlefields, to the forests, to the cities, to the slums, finding himself in allegiance not with either side in the Thirty Years War but with himself. Simplicissimus wears many masks, plays many roles. He is court jester, a warrior, a huntsman, a lover, a quack, a musketeer, a duped man, a cuckhold, a mystic. He begins as the fool but is transformed by the knowledge he acquires within the World. But his knowledge leads him eventually into corruption. He is continually wise, at times naive, at times bitter. By the end, the reader feels he/she has journeyed with the narrator, accompanied him and begins to sense the world weariness of his wanderings, his lack of place in a dark time; the longing to turn away from life pervades the last quarter of the novel. The last chapter alone could have been written in any century, in any time. Simplicissimus is the great Everyman reflecting on the hopelessness and absurdity of life where the useless are presented as useful and the useful, useless. Especially now, in a time where politics is more a sideshow, where leaders appear less real and like characters in a bad Disney movie, Simplicissimus' remarks and conclusions hit home in a profound and universal way. This book is timeless and will carry on through the centuries. So long as we are born into the freak show of life (as George Carlin put it), this book will be a faithful and timeless mirror to the mockery that is the World governed by men and their greedy, foolish and hopeless ideals.

Mayhem on the Rhine

Howling wolves! Marauding Swedes! Neighbors burning each other's matrirachs at the stake! For slaughter and devastation, nothing beats the Thirty Years War, fought across 17th Century Germany at roughly the same time as the colonization of New England. Considering that it was fought with sticks and stones, and a few well-nicked swords, no war has ever caused a greater number of civilian casualities per capita, or determined a nation's future so decisively for so many centuries. It was a war of religion, of course, always the most ferocious, senseless kind of war, fought between sects of Christians who hated each other as devilishly as Sunni and Shia in Iraq. Simplicius Simpicissimus - stupidly retitled here as "Adventures of a Simpleton" - is the greatest classic of its time and place, the Don Quixote and Forrest Gump of German literature, yet not widely read in the English world. It's as funny as Flashman, as philosophical as Candide, and as human as Tom Jones or any other great "picaresque" novel in history. "Picaresque" derives from the Spanish word "picaro", meaning rogue, and our hero Simplicius is certainly a rogue, at least in his middle chapters. (The prototypical picaro was Lazarillo de Tormes, of Salamanca; if you haven't read Lazarillo, stop now! Read it and come back another day!) But Simplicius is first described as a rare fool, a child raised with no knowledge of the world, a "holy innocent" with the comic ability to outwit almost any adversary. Eventually a different fate awaits the simpleton-turned-knave, but you'll have to read the book to discover it. A note on translation: This is a beginner's version of Simplicius Simplicissimus, abridged and narrated in generic plain-speaking American English, with no pretensious archaisms. Quick access, in short to the basic story, but lacking the quaint smack of von Grimmelshausen's rollicking dialect. For German readers, a translation has no point; the original is far easier for them than Shakespeare for Americans or Don Quixote for Spaniards. There are several more complete English translations, but in their efforts at completeness they tip toward ponderousness. The real origins of the picaresque genre are far deeper than the Renaissance or Baroque. There are essentially picaresque "novels" in Hellenic Greek and pre-Christian Norse, and the great Chinese rogue, the Monkey King, should be part of every child's library. But as a study of human depravity during times of civil war, Simplicius is unsurpassed.

Re-visiting the future

Der abenteurlische Simplicissimus is a book worth reading today. What is most surprising is not the delight one takes in the surreal adventures of our (anti) hero, but the recognition that the world he moves in has so many similarities to the beginning of the 21st century.

Abridged

The listing doesn't indicate this is an abridged edition, only about half the size of the original: for the full text, try Michael Mitchell's "Simplicissimus" (1903517427).

Delightful English translation, but NOT the complete novel

Mitchell's translation of Grimmelshausen's picaresque novel about a boy from SW Germany in the 1620s who has his life disrupted by the Thirty Years War, into which he is swept up for decades is delightfully funny. Unfortunately, Mitchell's version follows the commonly available (and artificially antiquated) Goodrick translation and omits the sixth book! Grimmelshausen wrote a whole cycle of ten novels revolving around Simplicissimus and other Thirty Years War characters, most of which are not readily available in a contemporary English translation. This, the core novel, is the most famous of the lot, but I can't help but feel disappointed by the lack of the sixth book, which was referenced by Borges (in "The Book of Imaginary Beings") and by others. I feel as though readers of "Don Quixote" must if they discover that they have read only the first part of his multi-part novel. The work of Cervantes, however, is much more readily available in English than is Grimmelshausen, so the absence is easily rectified; with the Simplicissimus books, however, one takes what one can get. Mitchell's translation of Books 1 - 5 is, fortunately, quite good, and there aren't any references in the first five books to events in the sixth book which would be weirdly jarring if the final book is missing, so there's no reason to feel cheated unless you KNOW that something has been left out. Mitchell's version is in good colloquial English and is a fast and satisfying read. I went through the whole book in a few days, finding it very difficult to put down. Mitchell writes so smoothly that the reader is swept breathlessly along just as Simplicissimus himself was.This is THE classic novel of the Thirty Years War, which caused the death of one-third the population of Germany and involved almost every country from Sweden to Italy and from Spain to Russia, and -- strangely enough -- it's a comedy. Perhaps the war was so terrible that afterwards the only way for the survivors to stay sane was to laugh about the bitter joke which history played upon them. "Simplicissimus" is regarded by many as a definitive account of the mood and temperment of many of the survivors. Read it and laugh ... or weep. It's the story of Everyman and Everywoman caught up in an insane war in which the only option is make everything a joke, because the reality of the situation is too terrible to consider.