Riassunto
Riassunto di Notturni
A chi è rivolto
For readers who love ghost stories, Gothic atmosphere and tales where the mind plays tricks, and anyone curious about the roots of modern horror.
Che cos’è questo libro
Night Pieces is a pair of story collections by E. T. A. Hoffmann, published in 1816 and 1817. Hoffmann was a German lawyer, composer and writer, and these eight tales are among the works that made his name. They are stories of night, of fear, of obsession and of things glimpsed at the edge of sight. The best known is The Sandman, a tale that has been retold, studied and adapted for two centuries.
What do you get from them? You get a guide to the Gothic and the uncanny, written by a man who loved both music and the law. In these pages a strange event is never fully explained. Is the danger out in the world, or inside the mind of the person who sees it? Hoffmann keeps both answers open, and that is where the unease comes from. Let us begin with the author and the shape of the collection, because they explain a good deal about the tales that follow.
In questo riassunto
- 1A lawyer and musician writes of the nightFree
- 2The Sandman begins with a childhood terror
- 3An old fear returns in a new guise
- 4Haunted houses and haunted rooms
- 5Crime, devotion, art and treasure
- 6What the tales are about and how they work
Punto chiave 1 di 6
A lawyer and musician writes of the night
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was born in Königsberg and trained as a lawyer. He served as a judge and official in the Prussian state, and he also worked as a composer, conductor and music critic. He changed his third name from Wilhelm to Amadeus out of love for Mozart. That double life, one foot in the courtroom and one in the concert hall, shapes his fiction.
Night Pieces came out in two volumes. The first holds The Sandman, Ignaz Denner, The Jesuit Church in G., and The Sanctus. The second holds The Abandoned House, The Entail, The Vow, and The Stone Heart. Together they make eight tales, and they differ a great deal in setting and mood. Some take place in lively towns, some in lonely country houses, some in churches and studios.
What joins them is a feeling that ordinary life is thin. Behind a window, a door or a face, something else may be waiting. Hoffmann writes as a man who knows how rules, contracts and reason work, and he enjoys showing where they stop working. His characters are often artists, students, lawyers and lovers, people who live by their feelings or their wits.
The title matters too. A night piece is like a painting of a dark scene, lit by a single source of light. Each tale gives you a small lit area and leaves the rest in shadow. You are never sure what lies beyond it. That habit of leaving things unsaid is part of what you will meet in every story in the set.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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