The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch: A Grotesque Tale of Horror

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Learning about the uncompromising life he led, by choosing to live according to the philosophy he had embraced - influenced by Berkeley's subjectivism, by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer - is quite affecting in itself, or at least it was for me. Defying so consistently and unfledgingly all social conventions, to the extent of enduring extreme discomfort, poverty, loneliness, can be considered mad and brave at the same time, admirable and terrible and appalling, but is also a way to force the rest of the world to question their own choices, or lack of them, their own condescension and mental paralysis and conformism.

In a sense, The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch does just that. It uses the classic elements of the gothic genre, which in itself already provides the means to defy social norms and conventions, as well as bourgeois sensibility - horror, creepiness, disturbing characters, murder, ghosts, even wild sex - and subverts them all, at times subtly, at others wildly, outrageously, and blatantly, through the use of cynical and grotesque humour, by subverting readers' expectations, and by never making it quite clear how reliable the narrator is, whether events are actually happening, or whether they are just the main character's hallucinations.

And this is why now, when even what must have felt like outrageously shocking scenes when the book was written probably have less of an impact on the modern reader, this book still feels very fresh, and young and untamed. This, I think, is due to the rather disorienting subjectivism which underlies the book, and which poses basic epistemological problems to the reader some people would say this makes it a quintessentially modernist book because of this. The problematic narrator probably going mad and therefore unreliable, but whose writing has been heavily edited, as is openly acknowledged at the opening of the book, as if to pose this basic epistemological problem right at the outset gives the whole narration a deeply uncertain footing for the reader, who can never be sure on what grounds he or she is standing.

Going back to Kafka, who famously wrote we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. I feel that this is what this book is furiously attempting to do. Dec 09, Ariel rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Existentialists, lovers of free will.

If you like Nietzsche, fiction, obscenity, violence, and the German aristocracy, this is your book. Also comes complete with dark and foreboding humor. En fin, algo parecido. Dostoevsky meets Poe with some Xtra doses of goth, surrealism, absurdism, and grotesqueism for good fire. On top of that, the aesthetics of this book by Twisted Spoon Press, I mean the layout itself, is outstandingthe cover, the artwork inside, the back cover which says nothing more than "Beauty is love kissing horror.

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I can't go wrong. Those literary critics could write a couple of volumes on this bookthat is, of its weaknesses: But hold on again.

I think it started with the humor, but at some stage I started feeling my Baudelaire twitch all over again. The words and the ideas kind of stopped, there was no stage anymore, and I started getting beaten over the head. The writer himself seemed to be following his protagonist down some bizarre hole that squirmed and laughed and painted.

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Sure enough, after finishing the novel and delving into Mr. Klima a bit, starting with his own autobiographical essay placed in the text after the novel, I found I had another kind of Baudelaire on my hands. How did this happen? What is it that gets the poop to exit out of your anus on a cold morning?

I think Ladislav Klima pushes for the latter…. And when I get a chance to go back and read this again, it might find a fifth star. He describes his achievement of his philosophical knowledge through such activities as rolling naked in the snow and being consistently drunk, among other curious practices. I think that a lot of American readers will like this story, since the style is very reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, who also remains scary today with stories like The Black Cat and the Masque of the Red Death well, they still scare me anyway.

Another wonderful release from the Prague based Twisted Spoon Press. Feb 06, Neon Magazine rated it really liked it.

The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch by Ladislav Klíma (2008, Paperback, Reissue)

Prince Sternenhoch is an important man. He is worth five hundred million marks, and has the ear of powerful men. Unmarried, he is nonetheless a dashing fellow. Sternenhoch discovers the betrayal and sends his wife into his palace dungeon where, we presume, she dies. Full review at www. Aug 05, Kyle Crawley rated it it was ok. A little bit like Poe. A little bit like Krzhizhanovsky. But not nearly as good.

I was really excited to read Klima, as I'm usually a big fan of Czech literature i. Hrabel, Kundera, Capek but Klima was a bit of a letdown.

Actually, that isn't totally fair. The ravings on Pure Will were very engaging and made me want to read some Schopenhauer.

Knotsgek boek waarin vorst gek wordt van zijn duivelse vrouw. Volgens het nawoord had Klima een nogal eigenzinnige filosofie; ik kon hem in dit boek niet ontdekken. May 16, Chocobo rated it it was amazing. The set of the story is not exactly specified but we can assume it is somewhere near the Czech-German border. The story focuses on prince Sternenhoch and his wife, both living in a brownstone house. Helga looks down on her husband and refuses even to speak to him.

Things change when she gives birth to their child. She murders him and starts living the life in a completely different way — she finds herself a new lover, she even takes part in orgies. Prince Sternenhoch is very upset about it and he ends up killing her and her lover. His wife manifests herself as a ghost many times and the reader may be puzzled by it — it brings a question is she really dead? You will find out at the end of the book.

There are many layers of the story, some of them are grotesque however some of them will stuck in your head and make you think about them for a long time. There are not many characters in the story but all of them are very distinctive. We can see their true natures unveiling themselves by the situations they are involved in. The author was not afraid of themes of murder, madness, perversity, zoophilia, necrophilia and, more importantly, nihilism.

The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch is not an easy book to read. Unexperienced readers may find it way too difficult and puzzling. However, andvanced readers will definitely enjoy the twisted but not shallow tone of the narration and philosophical depth of the story. This book is one of the biggest achievements of writers influenced by the kinky beauty of expressionism. Gothic descent into madness This is a lovely edition by Twisted Spoon Press of a very peculiar novel. The grotesque and the sublime, the extravagant and the playful, run through this novel breathlessly written by a philosopher who wanted to recover his health.

Kundrecensioner

As a story of one man's madness, this work is up there with Dostoevsky and Kafka, though with a bitter sense of humor and absurdist, almost maniacal outlook on life. It is a classic darkly comic and obscenely funny piece of writing, — not for everyone but a wild excursion indeed. The tone of the book is serious, but not without humour and irony.

The context is hilarious. The author gave the work the subtitle: The structure, the building of this work and its theme, where the ego battles with evil and logic, refers to the literary tradition of Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky and Gogol's Diary of a Madman. A Grotesque Tale of Horror delivers on its title. It has everything; a decadent noble of questionable intelligence and sanity; a twisted, depraved, satanic shrew; not so graphic lewdness; dungeons, murder, madness It is frankly, at times, difficult to stomach; and I have read The Days of Sodom — more than once.

The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch

The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch may transmit the author's moral nihilism and Nietzschean will to power as well as any treatise. It is a hilarious, provocative, graphic — and at times spectacularly vile — gothic novel, conspicuously rooted in the Decadent milieu that spawned it, but painted in colors more characteristic of the Expressionist and Surrealist movements regnant when it was finally published two decades later.

There's much of the whip in all this, a great fascination with all things perverse Much scabrous wit and the hallucinatory nature of events leave the reader uncertain about taking anything seriously.

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