The Spell

by Hermann Broch

Book Overview

Vintage book This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374267618
• ISBN13: 9780374267612
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 391 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A caveat or two before you read...

Review: The Spell by Hermann Broch I almost never post book reviews, but felt compelled to do so here as a caveat…not that this is a terrible book, but it is a difficult one…but not as Ulysses might be called difficult. I tried (third time through, since I first read in 1988) to understand the “how” of the writing. I will start out by saying please do read the Author’s Commentary, the Genesis of the Novel, and the Translator’s Note, all in the rear of the volume…but obviously not the Epilogue just yet. Read these before you read the novel itself. Each time I read this novel it was as though I was reading it anew, remembering little from previous reading(s). This could be interpreted as a compliment I guess, but I am not so sure about that. The author wrote the first version in 1935, and rewrote it in 1936. Work recommenced in 1950 in the US to prepare it for translation, but author died in 1951. The first version, here, is the one published in German in 1976, and later as the English translation in 1987. The author states his intention of describing mass-psychological occurrences, including the rise of Hitler and Nazism. This was my first motivation for reading it. He does this by setting “the action in a primitive mountain village which in its remoteness allows for the most basic human interrelations,” and also entrusting the “probing of individual minds to a journal kept by the village doctor.” So, to the difficulties. Some I think are in the translating, which the translator himself acknowledges. Philosophical and psychological contemplations might not survive the journey from German to English. There may not be equivalent words or phrases for the ideas. Not a reader of German, I cannot comment except to say I found myself reading, and rereading, and rereading sentences (which are sometimes the same as paragraphs, more on this later) to get to the structure, and any “action” they might convey. Often many are not about action but simply atmosphere: “All around us in the great clarity of the darkly transparent air, the mountains rose starkly against the snow-colored sky, in hard contrast their peaks and rocks, covered in deep white down below the tree line, reaching down into the greenery even lower on the north slopes, and in all that brightness the rocky masses which everywhere had grown out of the snow or had shaken it off took on the color of a yellow-black darkness: a great and secure coolness before us, the garland of winter crowning the green and brown valley below in which autumn still nestled softly.” (And yes, I verify that is a single paragraph/ sentence—p.329—which follows many like it, and precedes many more of a similar nature, some much longer!) There are a number of words that are not used in English as they are anachronistic and/or obscure. This is especially true of adjectives describing the mountain air, sky, or light. Keep a good dictionary handy! I have read Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan series, and some of Terence McKenna’s work, and have partaken of psychedelics myself, both medicinal and chemical. Though never stated by the author or the narrator, I sensed that the “action” of the novel occurs during a long dream state, perhaps induced (one character does collect forest herbs as folk medicine, but it is the doctor/narrator who goes on, and on, in the paragraph/sentences, as above). I can appreciate the difficulty of getting such experiences down in words on paper. The most sad I have ever felt in my life were the times when, the medicine/drug was waning and I struggled, in vain to express what I had been seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, etc. It was simply lost to me. At best, I may have approached it in photographs I made subsequently, sometimes years later. I am able to admire stories that are not focused strictly on “action,” but might be more based on character, mood, or tone. But if one were to reduce the action in this novel it might fill at best, an average-length short sto

Contacts with the infinte through nature

This may be my favorite Broch novel. Broch's language is giddy. I get the sense that he is keenly aware of how all of German culture, working through Goethe to his present time was ripening. The ripening was both beautiful and evil, a ripening and an over-ripening, rotting. Broch was exiled (or exiled himself). He was certainly not one of those complicit in the evils of his time. He ends up at Yale, writing non-fiction about mass psychology. *The Spell*, and *Sleepwalkers* both deal with mass psychology through fiction. In both Broch and Musil we get a lot of talk about "the infinite". I see this as a ripening of Goethe's naturalism, with help from Nietzsche. "But what I wish to recall is that day in March, now many months past, indeed almost a full year past, as remote as yesterday and as close as childhood, for this is the only way our memory works: it raised one event or another and thereby encompasses both living and dying; it takes hold of a single instant which in itself may not be significant at all, but because it Invests such a moment with the meaning of its past and of its permanence and transposes the human experience into that of nature, beyond death and life and into the irrevocable, because of the transmutation into the irremediable, I wish to recall that day in March...." Nature, beyond good and evil is now extended to, "beyond death and life", virtually beyond time. The book keeps developing this idea. The little Austrian town is a microcosm of Germany/Austria, and the new comer is like Hitler, leading the folk into collective pathologies. The contact with the infinite fleshes out Nietzsche's and Wagner's (and J.P. Hebel's) idea that our actions are sanctioned through death. Broch explains this as a yearning for contact with the infinite, a yearning to transcend time. (Jean Gebser calls time the last frontier, following the "perspectival" age that focused on space.) The town is a mining town, and Broch continues the great tradition of cave/mine transformational metaphors, so rich in German Romanticism, in Novalis, Hoffmann, Goethe (the fairy tale). The mine is the alchemical limbic, the crucible, where "transmutation into the irremediable" takes place. The development of these collective pathologies in Broch's novel, I remember being absolutely gripping, excruciating. Broch wrote this work before 1940. Amazing how well he maps out Hilter's project before it was fully implemented.

A great german novel of the 1st half of the 20th C

The Spell is a triple themed suspense story: the themes are portraits of individuals bound and sustained by the land and by its customs, the concretization of visionary reality, and the assimilation of individualized evil into society. Very finely written, mytho-poetic narrative.