By Hanns Heinz Ewers 1911
Translated by Joe E. Bandel 2009
Illustrated by Mahlon Blaine
In cooperation with the Hanns Heinz Ewers Estate.
Alraune and Galeotto Copyright Wilfried Kugel
Translation of Alraune and Galeotto copyright Joe E. Bandel
This is Hanns Heinz Ewers most famous novel, newly translated and uncensored for the first time in the English language. Alraune is a classic melding of the Frankenstein and Mandrake myth depicting the creation of a strange girl and her influence on those that love her.
Available in PDF for Adobe Digital Editions Format
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By Stephanie Hagen
Mar 5, 2010
Joe Bandel's translation of Hanns Heinz Ewers' "Alraune", is enthralling. Mahlon Blaine's illustrations are bizarre, beautiful. What more can I say...I was disturbed, fascinated, repulsed, entranced...trapped with all the other helpless fools.
I am a novice reader for this book in a couple of senses: I do not read many translations, and I also do not read many books older than I am. I believe this might be a major reason why I didn't thoroughly enjoy this book, which was generously provided free of charge as an eBook by the translator. One of the big issues I had with the book is that I don't know a lot about how Germany was around the turn of the century. A lot of the geography, politics, and culture are foreign to me, and the book flows as if the reader is intimately familiar with the setting already. I think this might be why the author is not well-known today; what separates truly great works from those that have their set place is the ability of the author to create something that rises above the mundane and everyday to find at least one universal truth to stand upon in order to be understood outside its time and location. The story itself has an interesting pace, at times moving quickly from event to event, at other... More > times slowing to allow some suspense to build. It's an odd plot, to say the least -- feeding both a fear of science and a fear of folk magic, I think -- that mostly works. The one fault, I feel, is that there really isn't someone to identify with. The title character is mainly to be alternately feared, loathed, or pitied, but so are the people who become her victims, for the most part. If they aren't one of those three, they're too-small a character to participate in the action. The translation, I thought, was fairly good. I have a feeling that most of the issues I have with the written word was the fault of Ewers' word choice in the original German, and not with Bandel's interpretation of his words. Overall, I feel that, if I were better educated or more experienced, I would have pulled something more out of this book.< Less
Finally Ewers' great novel has been translated into English, an unexpected luxury considering his fall into almost complete obscurity even in his native Germany. But if we stopped reading the work of every writer who was associated with repulsive ideologies the literary canon would be virtually decimated. This is a work touching on themes that could not be more significant to a modern reader, and the knowledge of the terrible events that would follow this period of German history only serve to heighten the nightmarish quality of the book. Furthermore, this translation practically sings and is an absolute pleasure to read. If you are interested in exploring the work of this complex and intriguing author there is no better place to start. I cannot recommend this book more highly.
