By Arno Schmidt
Translated by John E. Woods
ISBN: 9781628974560
Publication Date: 1/28/2025
Nobodaddy's Children is a trilogy of novels that traces life in Germany from the Nazi era through the postwar years and into an apocalyptic future. Scenes from the Life of a Faun recounts the dreary life of a government worker who escapes the banality of war by researching the exploits of a deserter from the Napoleonic Wars nicknamed The Faun. Brand's Heath deals with the chaos of the immediate postwar period as a writer joins a small community of "survivors" to try to forge a new life, and Dark Mirrors is set in a future where civilization has been virtually destroyed. Dark Mirrors' narrator fears he may be the last man on earth until the discovery of another creates new fears. All three novels are characterized by Schmidt's unique combination of sharply observed details, sarcastic asides, and wide erudition.
Praise for Nobodaddy's Children:
“Linked by recurring images, as well as by their pessimistic eloquence, these challenging works mingle fractured narrative and overlapping dialogue, rhetorical questions and expostulations, exclamatory overpunctuation, and other stylistic devices and delusions in the manner that justifies the late (1914-79) Schmidt's deserved reputation as the German Joyce. It also makes him that rarest of rarities: an experimental writer who's actually fun to read.” —Kirkus Reviews
“They comprise—in their unique author's highly personal style of hybrid digressive montage—a hilariously confrontational picture of his native Germany from the Hitler years well on into the indefinite, postapocalyptic future.” —Kirkus Reviews
Further praise for Arno Schmidt:
“[Schmidt] is a craggy giant of postwar German literature. If Heinrich Boll was the conscience of the nation and Gunter Grass put political engagement on the literary agenda, Schmidt was the grand experimenter. He was a writer of arcane but brilliant practice, an uncompromising innovator whose learning, wit and originality place him in the front rank of modern European fiction.” —Jeremy Adler, The New York Times
“But Schmidt was one of the most significant German authors of the twentieth century; he was in many ways the essential outsider, and his determined radical stance was the foundation of his finest achievements. He confronted in his work the challenge of developing Modernism in a post-war German context, not just formally, linguistically and typographically but also socially and politically.” —Alan Crilly, The Times Literary Supplement
“Reading Bottom’s Dream, John E. Woods’s new English translation of Arno Schmidt’s notoriously-untranslatable Zettel’s Traum, is like watching one of these beasts saunter out of the forest and begin munching on a telephone pole: the sheer, jurassic weirdness of the thing scrambles our pathways, making it difficult to do anything except stare.” —Josh Billings, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A marvelous writer, very much worth discovering.” —Kirkus Reviews
“One could not tell if this was amazing, or if this was something for crazy people,” —Susanne Fischer, head of the Arno Schmidt Foundation
“For me, Bottom’s Dream became something of an obsession, a physical and psychological white elephant that squatted in my thoughts, filled my vision, and defied just about all of my expectations. This text is a leviathan ouroboros, locked in a constant, cyclical metamorphosis and magnifying a simple, organic process to an impossibly vast scale so that we might see the inherent complexity within.” —John Venegas, Angel City Review
Arno Schmidt (1914–1979) was born in the working-class suburb of Hamburg-Hamm, Germany. Drafted into the army in 1940, he served in the artillery at a flak base in Norway until the end of the war. After being held as a prisoner of war for eight months, he worked briefly as an interpreter for the British military police. His first book, Leviathan, was published in 1949. In 1958 Schmidt moved to the village of Bargfeld near Celle. Over the next twenty years, until his death, he wrote some of the landmarks of postwar German literature, many of which are available in translation from Dalkey Archive Press.
John E. Woods won both the 1981 American Book Award and PEN award for his translation of Schmidt's Evening Edged in Gold and has published a new translation of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.
Excerpt
I
(February 1939)
Thou shalt not point thy finger at the stars; nor write in the snow; but when it thunders
touch the earth : so I sent a tapering hand upward, with beknitted finger drew the slivered <K> in the silver scurf beside me, (no thunderstorm in progress at the moment, otherwise I’d have come up with something !) (In my briefcase the wax paper rustles).
The moon’s bald Mongol skull shoved closer to me. (The sole value of discussions is :
that good ideas occur to you afterward).
The main road (to the station) coated with silver strips; shoulders cemented high with
coarse snow, diamonddiamond (macadamized; — was Cooper’s brother-in-law by the by). The trees stood there, giants at august attention, and my look-alive steps stirred beneath me. (Just ahead the woods will retreat to the left and fields advance). And the moon must have still been bustling at my back, since sometimes sharp rays flitted strangely through the needled blackness. Far ahead a small car bored its bulging eyes into the matutinal night, wiggled them slowly looking about, and then clumsily turned the red glow of its monkey’s butt toward me : glad it’s driving off !
My life ? !: is not a continuum ! (not simply fractured into white and black pieces by day
and night! For even by day they are all someone else, the fellow who walks to the train; sits in the office; bookworms; stalks through groves; copulates; small-talks; writes; man of a thousand thoughts; of fragmenting categories; who runs; smokes; defecates; listens to the radio; says “Commissioner, sir” : that’s me !): a tray full of glistening snapshots.
Not a continuum, not a continuum ! : that’s how my life runs, how my memories run (like
a spasm-shaken man watching a thunderstorm in the night):
Flash : a naked house in the development bares its teeth amid poison- green shrubbery : night.
Flash : white visages are gaping, tongues tatting, fingers teething : night.
Flash : tree limbs are standing, boys play pubescing; women are stew¬ing; girls are scamping open-bloused : night !
Flame : me : woe : night ! !
But I cannot experience my life as a majestically unrolling ribbon; not I ! (Proof).
Drift ice in the sky : chunks; a floe. Chunks; a floe. Black crevices in which stars crept
(sea stars). A pale, white fish belly (moonfish). Then :
Cordingen Station : the snow prickled softly on the walls; a black switch- wire quivered
and husked hawaiian; (at my side the she-wolf appeared, covered with silver grains. Climb aboard for starters).
The great white she-wolf : growled the greeting, took a savage seat and tugged out her
textbook by one corner; then from her pen she extracted many jagged inky threads, ducked low, and gazed with her round eyes into an invisible hole. The red swarm of my thoughts circled a bit about her, snarling, with round eyes, yellow-rimmed. (But then here came another, a black one, and I whetted my mouth and stared disapprovingly at the dirty slatted benches : sparkling thickskulled brass screws, roundheads, beaded through us : how can you escape stuff like that ? ! The she-wolf scratched in the frost on the window, for her girlfriend to get on : ergo : Walsrode).