How do you catagorise E.T.A Hoffman? Romantic, surreal, magical realism, gothic, horror? I'm not really sure, I think he's mostly files under fiction which tells the reader nothing. Perhaps influential is the word that really sums him up - a writer who's work and imagination still permeates popular culture but there's a good chance you've never heard of (I think anyone reading this will have heard of him, but we're a select group).
The King's Bride is at the lighter end of Hoffmann's output - mostly a comedy with some excellent jokes and only a few horrifying moments. Anna is happily engaged to her neighbours son, Amandus, currently at university and fancying himself a poet whilst she remains at home and concerns herself with the kitchen garden. Her father, something of a philosopher, astronomist, and astrologer, spends his days studying the sciences from the comfort of his tower.
One day Anna discovers a gold ring on a carrot in her garden, puts it on and finds herself engaged to Corduanspitz - a gnome, or possibly the king of carrots, which is a much worse thing to be than a gnome. Anna is at first horrified, and then reconciled as she's led to believe she will reign over the finest vegetable garden in the world, and then horrified again as she realises she's being changed into something more like her prospective husband. Will Amandus forget his poetry for long enough to save the day and his true love? Will her father maybe manage it instead? Or will Corduanspitz win out and carry Anna away, and what of his feud with the radishes?
In the spirit of any romance worth the name there's a happy outcome for Anna, and plenty of amusement for the reader - the portrait of Amandus as an undergraduate over confident in his own abilities as a poet is an absolute treat, and there's more than enough unease behind the comedy to make things interesting.
This translation is part of Alma Classics 101 page classics series - a genius concept. It's not so much that my concentration is shot for long books (it is slightly) but that middle age has tired me out. I don't currently have the energy to read as much as I'd like to, or the time (because I fall asleep). Novellas are satisfying, they're also a fabulous way to test the waters before investing in a major work by a classic novelist, or as the season closes in on us, a really good small gift for Christmas.
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