Darkness and a Little Light: Stories

by Leila Vennewitz (Translator), Johannes Bobrowski

A P.O.W. in Russia after World War II, Bobrowski (1917-1965) returned to his forever-changed native province, former East Prussia, in 1949. His lost homeland––which he called by the region’s ancient name of Sarmartia––haunts all his work. Full of longing and an astonishing poetic beauty, the stories in  Darkness and a Little Light  are visionary elegies to vanished ways of life. Some of the stories, set in the nineteenth century or in the darkness of World War II, are directly threnodic. But underneath the tales relating the dreary, oversynthesized reality of East German life in the ’50s and ’60s linger traces of an older, more atmospheric world of nature and memory.

111 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1993

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sparse and otherworldly, these are closer to poems than prose, most of them not exceeding a few pages. That's not a bad thing, though, since Bobrowski's poetry is some of the best you will ever read. The stories collected here are dark and strange, full of an oldworldy, otherworldy charm that would read well by hearthlight while winter rages outside your isolated little cabin. Like his poetry, Bobrowski's prose is distinct and incomparable.

[Janaka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Questionably belonging to prose, these short (often micro) stories by the poet Bobrowksi are composed of oblique sentences that manage--without flourish--to be be simultaneously simple and dense. The best of these feels like reading on predecessor to Gary Lutz, or a contemporary of William H. Gass, but too often I found my mind straying or coming to the end of a passage left with little more than a shrug. Some readers may easily find more to chew on here than I did, but I can't recommend it to most.

[Viet · Rating 3 out of 5]

"This is where the beggar must have stood, an old man called Morkus, every evening, to throw a few of his beggar’s coins into the water. He wanted the lake to rise above its banks. He wants it to make a great effort, and it is to be rewarded, coin by coin. He wants it to overflow its banks, which isn’t easy, and reach the streets and the big house where the Tsarist general lives, creep up to the steps, then surge all around the house and over the fences. There the general sits, up on the terrace, black and red in the face, the devil, and hasn’t noticed it right away, and now he can’t leave, the water is everywhere, and nothing will carry him across all that rushing and foaming, he’ll drown with his house, for he is made of iron."

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

This a short work of mostly very short stories--several pages long in most cases. I found none to be evocative or even dense, as other reviewers have stated. I found each to be well written, but rather pointless.