Other lives, other pasts which we can only picture to ourselves in words, not in their own time—which we would have dealt with differently, or in which we did not even exist— such lives have something abstract, something monstrous about them, that cannot be fully grasped.

Hans Henny Jahnn wrote dark serpentine fiction of an elusive nature, often carrying vague and sometimes not-so-vague homoerotic undercurrents. Unfortunately for non-German readers, most of what he wrote remains out of linguistic reach. This slim volume published by Atlas Press contains much of his fiction that has been translated into English, outside of The Ship, from which the first story ('Kebad Kenya') has been excerpted. The second story ('Sassanid King') is also an excerpt from a novel, Perudja, his first and most celebrated, which remains untranslated into English.

Neither of these first two stories engaged me in a deep way. 'Kebad Kenya' is a convoluted death hymn that left me feeling cold. Not at all similar, 'Sassanid King' is a manic slice of ancient Middle Eastern historical fiction that also failed to capture my interest. (I should probably reread both of them.) With 'A Master Selects his Servant', however, my interest began to grow. Here, Jahnn's Gothic leanings rise to the surface in a riveting fashion. Having recently read Coleman Dowell's collected short fiction, my occasional taste for the Gothic had been whetted, so this story continued a welcome stimulation of that appetite. The first person narration lent a welcome intimacy, as well. Jahnn's process of characterization felt complete here for the first time in the collection, the first two stories perhaps having suffered by their excision from larger texts, which allowed me to at last sink deeper into his world. This descent continued with the final piece, the novella titled 'The Night of Lead', which is his best known work.

Death permeates all of Jahnn's writing here. He employs grotesque description, yet in a matter-of-fact manner. Some of the existential wanderings in fiction of Kafka, Beckett, and Blanchot felt relevant for comparison, at least in tangential terms. In 'The Night of Lead' Jahnn uses the concept of an 'other' to explore the inner darkness of the self and the gulf that can expand and shrink between the individual and society. However, there is the lingering sense that Jahnn kept his private concerns quite close to himself in his fiction, leaving the reader to largely poke around in the dark. His obfuscation of meaning in his texts, then, serves to stop short the potential for any universal truths seeping out around the blurry edges. There are no easy answers here, and sometimes even the questions are murky at best.

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