Time to Rob the Dead
Jeremy Adler
- The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus by Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, translated by Mike Mitchell
Dedalus, 433 pp, £13.99, April 2017, ISBN 978 1 903517 42 0
Hans Grimmelshausen’s Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, first published in 1668, is one of the great picaresque novels. Like Cervantes and Hašek, Grimmelshausen invented a naive, feckless hero with a guileless yet lovable persona whose innocent wisdom shows up the folly of the world around him. Simplicissimus comes to symbolise sanity in a depraved, degenerate Europe torn apart by the Thirty Years’ War, and the novel, besides being funny, was German Baroque literature’s most powerful plea for peace.
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Vol. 39 No. 6 · 16 March 2017 » Jeremy Adler » Time to Rob the Dead
pages 31-32 | 2376 words
