Two Novels: The Stony Heart and B/Moondocks

B/Moondocks has parallel stories, one played out in a rural German town in the late 1950s, and the other on the moon in 1980 (the book was first published in German in 1960).

At the heart of both is an absolute commitment to two things: freeing language from its commonplace prose functions, and Schmidt's ongoing savage attack on the German mind-set and attitude that gave us two world wars in this century.

Among Schmidt enthusiasts, scholars, and fans, the two novels stand in sharp contrast to one another, the first belonging to his early, more realistic phase, and the second introducing his later, more experimental phase. But the hairs are not worth splitting.

Publishers Weekly

Rounding out Dalkey's four-volume series covering modernist writer Schmidt's (1914-1979) early period, these two novels (published in Germany in 1954 and 1960) give a glimpse of what was to come in Schmidt's larger works like Zettel's Traum (Zettel's Dream). In a style often compared to that of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Schmidt creates a kind of dreamlike narration that relies heavily on wordplay (especially neologisms) and floats in and out of the characters' subconsciouses. In The Stony Heart, about an historical biographer, Schmidt captures a colloquial German speech that Woods deftly translates into a kind of Brooklynese: "Ohsuah: theah's a visitah's bureau heah." Schmidt's experimental narrative is difficult to follow. Reprising Mark Twain's famous warning to readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he writes in his introduction to B/Moondocks (which takes place both in a 1950s Bavarian town and on the moon in 1980): "Persons attempting to smell out or , or indeed to perceive herein a will be shot." For this reason, some readers may wish that the editors of this volume had made some effort to put his writing into a historical, biographical context or otherwise shed light on his unique and difficult style: a translator's introduction was included in the previous volumes but has been omitted for this somewhat less accessible work. With that said, this last edition nonetheless will be enjoyed by Schmidt scholars and other adventurous readers. (Feb.)

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.