Arno Schmidt: Amazon.co.uk: Orthofer, M.A.: 9781312650886.
Arno Schmidt's Neglected Recommendation FRIEDHELM RATHJEN. Arno Schmidt's books, it is only in his Joyce essays that Schmidt gives any. Schmidt in his radio essay also suggests that the “back beautiful” (FW 435.14) is owned by Josephine Duval, heroine of The Bishop's Jaegers. The nouns of this book's title, moreover, are.Born in 1914, Arno Schmidt is a contemporary of Boll. Schmidt's literary career, however, has steered him on a zigzag course. Because of the war, both Schmidt and Boll were unable to publish their first important works until they were in their early thirties, i.e., until 1949. And it was Schmidt, and not Boll, who first received an award.I have had a dream, and I wrote a Big Book about it, Arno Schmidt might have said. Schmidts rare vision is a journey into many literary worlds. First and foremost it is about Edgar Allan Poe, or perhaps it is language itself that plays that lead role; and it is certainly about sex in its many “I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was,” says Bottom.
Arno Schmidt (1914-1979) was one of the most remarkable writers of the twentieth century. Despite much of his work being available in English, his centenary passed nearly unremarked in the United States and England to the disappointment of those who frequent the mythical Literary Saloon.In a radio feature in 1956, on the occasion of the two-h u ndred-year anniversary of Moritz’s birth, Arno Schmidt made an impassioned case for reprinting these novels, for “ingenious books are not so richly abundant in our Germany that one can frivolously.
His most recent and current book and essay projects relate to twentieth-century German literary and cultural debates (Streitbare Literaten, C.B. Beck Verlag, 2005), the reception of James Joyce's works in German literature (The German Joyce, University Press of Florida, 2012), Arno Schmidt, and the apocalypse in European literature, philosophy, and theology.
