The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch
A Grotesque Tale of Horror
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Philosopher, novelist, essayist, madman, no Czech writer has had a greater impact on underground culture than Ladislav Klíma (1878-1928). Mentor to artists as diverse as Bohumil Hrabal and the Plastic People of the Universe, Klíma's approach to philosophy was similar to that of the sages of ancient India: philosophy should not be limited to speaking or writing about it, it should be lived. Adopting Nietzsche as his paragon, he embarked on a lifelong pursuit to become God, or Absolute Will, and he developed his conception of radical subjectivism in numerous essays, aphorisms, prose works, and plays.
The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch is the apotheosis of Klíma's philosophy. In a series of journal entries, the novel chronicles the descent into madness of Prince Sternenhoch, the German Empire's foremost aristocrat and favorite of the Kaiser. Having become the "lowliest worm" at the hands of his deceased wife Helga, the Queen of Hells, Sternenhoch eventually attains an ultimate state of bliss and salvation through the most grotesque form of perversion. Klíma explores here the paradoxical nature of pure spirituality with a humor that is as darkly comical as it is obscene. This volume, the first of Klíma's work to appear in English translation, also includes his notorious screed “My Autobiography.a
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite the subtitle, this first English-language publication by Klima (1878-1928), a noted Czech philosopher, has little to offer readers of Stephen King. It is more screed than story, ostensibly the tale of a mad German prince who marries a completely appalling woman, who murders her father and infant before trysting with a filthy peasant who flogs her bloody while enduring her windy rants about her own abused, abusive and completely anti-social upbringing. Thus stimulated, the prince's "romance" continues well after his wife's apparent death. There's much of the whip in all this, a great fascination with all things perverse, but nothing that makes any of the characters more than bizarre caricatures. Much scabrous wit and the hallucinatory nature of events leave the reader uncertain about taking anything seriously. Appended is the author's autobiography, in which he turns out to be as pathological as any of his characters, a genuine transgressive in the manner of de Sade. Either our legs are being pulled, or this a fine example of the Ambrose Bierce dictum that the philosopher specializes in giving advice to people who are happier than he is.
