Castle Gripsholm

Kurt Tucholsky & Michael Hofmann

- 3.5 • 4 Ratings

- $9.99

- $9.99

A beguiling fable about a summer holiday in the Swedish countryside that transforms into a provocative parable about oppression and the evil awaiting Europe as the Nazis came to power.

Castle Gripsholm, the best and most beloved work by Kurt Tucholsky, is a short novel about an enchanted summer holiday. It begins with an assignment: Tucholsky’s publisher wants him to write something light and funny, otherwise about whatever Tucholsky wants. A deal is struck and the story is off: about Peter, a writer; his girlfriend, known as the Princess; and a summer vacation far from the hurly-burly of Berlin. Peter and the Princess have rented a small house attached to a historic castle in Sweden, and they have five weeks of long days and white nights at their disposal; five weeks for swimming and walking and sex and talking and visits with Peter’s buddy Karlchen and with Billie, the Princess’s best friend. It is perfect, until they meet a weeping girl fleeing the cruel headmistress of a home for children. The vacationers decide they must free the girl and send her back to her mother in Switzerland, which brings about an encounter with authority that casts a worrying shadow over their radiant summer idyll. Soon they must return to Germany. What kind of fairy tale are they living in?

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUN 3, 1988

A teasing lightness of tone as the narrator and his mistress playfully make love in the bland Swedish countryside entices the reader into a summertime idyll. But, wandering forth one day from their suite in a storybook castle, the lovers apprehend a tearstained little girl running for her life. She has broken out of the children's home on the other side of the lake, presided over by a sadistic headmistress whose grip grows more crushing the moment one of her charges tries to slip out of it. The two learn from the child her mother's whereabouts and contrive to take her there. These are the bare bones of a narrative that is in fact a parable for the evil threatening Germany in 1935. The author, a polemical journalist during the last days of the Weimar Republic, chose in this, his only novel, to write about the pleasures of wine and women and the gratifications of friendship, and to do so in prose so luminous and exuberant that the bitterness of real life in the children's home seems an intrusion. He has given us characters of wit and charm, who, even though they rescue one forlorn child, are powerless against the rising tide of horror.

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