Simplicius Simplicissimus

Going throughout the metaphysical linkage a child's wildness can be said to be prepossessed of, the tale journeys through a landscape of grief and tremendous social change. As Simplicius comes to be aware of his growing importance and the increasing demands of his condition as a man, he too comes to learn that he is human and capable of mistakes and that like the learned men of yore, he is also to be found capable of great as well as daring triumphs in resisting them. In this respect, this is an entirely banal book for people who prefer the dire and surreal. As someone in love with the grandiloquent style of late classical authors of the German Renaissance's arts-a-faire, I find this to be a most excellent book, one of my favourites by an author who I rarely see in discussion except in reference to his delightful weirdness and who is in my opinion innately gifted at matching wit with wonder. Comedy caters to who comes last, and I find as a guest to the party I must leave early. So, I will leave you with this: If you want to read a fairly modern book about the adventures of an innocent evolving backwards from a trunkling into a donkey, then you must read this grateful grid-iron from one of the preeminent passers of the era. And as for the style, don't resist! Get used to it. Enjoy it! Not only will it last, but it will stay with you long after you have read it, if nothing else for the understated way in which Grimmelshausen ends his story, completely and utterly decimating any attempts at a possible ending by nuking it from view with a four-hundred-years-ahead-of-time please-read-downward-poem and a piece that reads highly out even as it flows from within. Simply put, it is a superb Picardic tale and the one most people will readily imagine to be owned by a poet's view of chronicle-like imagery. For all its weirdness, it does not preach, but makes its point effectively that we must all live our lives faithfully and choose rightfully whether to be good or bad, even if we must first learn from life's hard knocks doing it. All in all, a solid work, only let down by the noninclusion of speech as a prophecy. I'm telling you, Fuentes did a miracle when working on Terra Nostra. That is all! Now! Be gone!...