This is the second of the five books called The Duel in Melville House’s Art of the Novella series that I’ve read, and the second that I haven’t been crazy about, though I’m still curious to read the others and see how I feel about them. I think there are two main things that contribute to me having thought this book was OK but not super-memorable or super-exciting: 1) the subject matter and 2) the style.
OK, right, I know, a book called The Duel is going to be about a duel. I don’t think that necessarily means I won’t love it, but it is a hurdle: the whole culture of knights and honor and chivalric fights to the death is so very far away in mindset and in time, and not just from me: Kleist’s book was first published in 1810, but is set in the late 1300s. There are universal things in the subject matter, yes: murder and vengeance and deceptions and truths, but there are also swords and armor and fainting and it’s hard for some of it not to read as melodramatic or, well, campy: “I will restore the resplendence of your name before the judgment of the court—and before the judgment of the whole world,” one character vows valiantly, and I just wanted to roll my eyes (21). There are moments when it totally works for me, though, like the moment of the challenge to the duel itself: this is over the top, yes, but kind of brilliantly so:
With the eyes of all the court upon him, Sir Friedrich snapped the letter from the herald’s outstretched hands, and, giving it a cursory look, proceeded to tear the letter from top to bottom. He rolled the pieces neatly into his glove, and, pronouncing Rotbart a vile slanderer, threw the glove into Rotbart’s face—challenging him to a trial by combat to settle once and for all the question of Littegarde’s innocence before the eyes of God and the world. (24)
But let me back up: plot-wise, The Duel starts with a murder that then leads to questions of guilt or innocence for more just the accused murderer. Duke Wilhelm is arriving home one night when he’s fatally struck by an arrow. He’s just managed to get the Kaiser to recognize his only living son, who was conceived out of wedlock, as legitimate; his estate, therefore, passes to his son, with his wife acting as regent until the boy comes of age. Everyone expects the Duke’s half brother, Count Jakob Rotbart, to be put out by this, particularly because the Count and the Duke hadn’t been on good terms/it’s not like the Count will be shattered by his death, but he graciously accepts the situation. But when the Duchess tries to find out who murdered her husband, she learns that the fatal arrow belonged to Count Rotbart, which is worrying, though she doesn’t want to actually accuse him of murder. The Count, though, says he’ll swear his innocence before a court, and claims as his alibi that he was having a tryst with a widowed noblewoman named Littegarde on the night of the murder. She denies it but has no alibi of her own, and appeals to a former suitor, Sir Friedrich, who happens also to be the Duke’s chamberlain, to come to her aid. Sir Friedrich, as quoted above, challenges the Count to a duel, saying the truth of whether it is Littegarde or the Count who is lying will be shown by God’s verdict, through the outcome of the fight. But can humans ever really know what God’s verdict is, or might things be other than as they initially appear? There are plot twists and surprises, and everything is wrapped up tidily at the book’s end, and I just couldn’t get excited about it, despite it being a good enough story. The style is straightforward and mostly matter-of-fact, and I think that was my other problem. In the whole book there was maybe one image that struck me as memorable, that of the duel as being “like two storm fronts swirling around each other—hurling and deflecting lightning bolts, towering above and rearing below the crack of heavy thunder” (29). The narrative isn’t richly detailed, or full of beautiful or striking images, or stylistically playful or inventive: not that all books have to be or should be, but I probably have a greater fondness for the ones that are. Sometimes the straightforward style works: when the Duchess sends the arrow “to all the workshops in Germany, in order to discover the arrowsmith who had made it, and once found, to learn the name of the patron who had commissioned the fatal arrow,” I thought there was something pleasingly fairy-tale-like in that: it’s like the prince in Cinderella, taking the glass slipper to every woman in the land to try on.
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