You have to pick and choose a bit with Stifter’s work – his late novel Indian Summer is a book of unyielding tedium, with a featureless narrator paying repeated visits to a house which is in a perfect relation to God and nature, with everyone tending trellises and drying fruit so that you want to scream. I was encouraged that one contemporary German critic said that he would offer the crown of Poland to anyone who could get to the end.
