Time to Rob the Dead

• The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus by Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, translated by Mike Mitchell
  Dedalus, 433 pp, £13.99, April, 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.