A Doppelgänger

de Theodor Storm

A Doppelgänger is the story of an unemployable ex-prisoner, told in a narrative framework of extraordinary originality and subtlety. The violent events of the earlier life of the doppelgänger, pieced together after his death, are in sharp contrast to his daughter's tender childhood memories of him. The present translation is the first in English. Aquis submersus is another narrative tour de force linking the past with the present. The meaning of a mysterious inscription on a seventeenth-century portrait of a dead child is gradually unraveled in the course of a story that is both a tragedy of passion and a historically masked critique of the landowning Junker class of Storm's own time. The translator's end-notes contain the wealth of historical and social background detail on the German North Sea coastal region, where these tales are set, that readers have found so absorbing in Denis Jackson's previous Storm editions.