I picked up Rock Crystal because I saw somewhere – I can’t remember where – that it was W.G. Sebald’s favourite book.
It’s a very slim volume that contains a single story of two children who get lost on in a snowstorm while crossing an Alpine pass on Christmas Eve. They struggle against tiredness, and are saved because their grandmother has given them a flask of coffee extract to take to their mother. They drink the coffee extract – their first encounter with any kind of stimulant – and make it through to the morning as a result.
It’s a beautifully written miniature that recalls the central episode in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain when Hans Castorp loses himself – literally and metaphorically – while skiing in a snowstorm. There’s no introductory essay here, so it’s hard to know if this correspondence is relevant – had Mann read Rock Crystal? – or whether it is just incidental. According to Wikipedia, Mann knew and admired Stifter’s work, saying he was “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature”, so I think that the link must at least be subconscious, if not more than that.
Rock Crystal has the delightful feel of a fairy tale, with a constant sense of dread hanging over the beautifully described action. It’s a tiny, perfectly-formed masterpiece.
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