On The Radar: A hot trio from Oneworld Classics, plus a title each from Mann and Hesse

“On the Radar” provides small incidental rundowns on books which I’ve discovered, but haven’t yet purchased. These are titles that I’ve either added to my wishlist or am keeping a close eye on, with a view to adding them. In addition, these are books which I feel may be of some interest to fellow readers, and I welcome feedback as always, on your own opinions and thoughts on the listed titles – especially if you’ve already had the pleasure of reading them.

I indulged myself at the weekend and along with spending a wad of birthday and Father’s Day cash on a number of much desired titles (more on these when they arrive), I spent an hour or two bolstering up my wish lists for future purchases. That there are three OneWorld Classics titles in this ‘On the Radar’ post is no coincidence. They’re a great publisher with some truly covetable titles in their inventory. I already have Oneworld Classic’s edition of Bunin’s The Village on my reading pile and it looks like three more are soon to join it. As for the others, well they’re equally covetable. My only concern is the morbid direction that my literary tastes seem to be going in.

Lenz by Georg Buchner [ISBN: 9781847490858] – A nineteenth-century tale based on the gradual descent into madness of real-life author Lenz, has to be appealing right? Even more so when you realise these bouts of madness occur while he’s wandering around the Vosges mountains. I think it sounds delicious, although I do sometimes wonder about the state of my own sanity when I find myself drawn to books like this.

The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf [ISBN: 9781847491084] – Everyone hate spiders right? *shivers* but what about a plague of allegorical ones attacking a ‘a petty and morally bankrupt village’? *double shiver* Well that’s the fate that befalls the villagers in this eighteenth-century novella by Jeremias Gotthelf. I ummed and awwed about this one for a while, until I read that Gotthelf believed that his writing had the ability to cure souls. That was the hook for me. Sold!!

The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo [ISBN: 9781847491176] – What better writer to entrust one’s money to than the great Victor Hugo? And what better way to spend one’s money, than on a novella based around the diary scribblings of a man facing execution? Yeah I know I have serious issues but when the publisher’s blurb describes it as “a poignant tale [that] vividly conveys the mental anguish of a man confronted with the intransigent mechanism of justice”, I’m going to find it difficult to resist.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann [ISBN: 9781400044214] – Any book that’s described as erudite and ambitious is sure to get my attention, especially when it’s also described as one of the 20th century’s most important works of German literature. It may be sprawling at 854 pages (for this edition), and a lot of people may have complained about it being ambiguous and slow-paced, but I sometimes enjoy drifting into a period of literary mediation (that will be why I enjoy Proust so much )). There’s also the fact it’s set in a sanatorium in the Swiss mountains ) *grin*

Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse [ISBN: 9780312422301] – OK, last but not least is a scrumptious looking novella from Herman Hesse. It’s a story about a gifted young scholar who heads off to a top school, only for him to have a nervous breakdown (oh look there’s that common theme again )) and get sent home again. What I love about this is it’s meant to be a dig by Hesse at the education system, and knowing Hesse it should be a fairly scathing one.