★★★☆☆ Old Surehand 1, by Karl May
Adventure for boys, unintentional humor for grown-ups
Old Surehand 1
Karl May
Adventure for boys, unintentional humor for grown-ups
In the early 1980's I spent a year in Germany. I went there with a year of college German. To improve my Deutsch, I read novels. If you're ever done this -- read books in a new language -- you know that your main problem is that you read V-E-R-Y ---S-L-O-W-L-Y. Thus you tend to gravitate towards short books. Simple language and a fast-moving plot are also good. One of my colleagues at the lab told me that German boys read books by Karl May.
May's biography on Wikipedia is worth a look. He spent much of his life in prison. No Nelson Mandela -- May was a petty thief and con artist. Eventually it dawned on him that the tall tales he invented as a conman could be written down and sold, entirely legally. He did that, and became one of the all-time best-selling German authors. He wrote adventure novels -- the most famous are his stories of the Wild West (American Wild West, that is). The best known are his Winnetou books, about a wise Apache warrior. The Winnetou books are succeeded by Old Surehand.
These books are told in the first person by a German cowboy, famous among the denizens of May's fictional Old West as "Old Shatterhand", so named for his great strength. Old Shatterhand is better than everyone (except Winnetou) at everything. Whenever some other character succeeds in some cowboyish endeavor, Old Shatterhand is there to patronize him (always a man, of course), "That was pretty good, but it would have been even better if you had..." At the time he wrote these books May had never visited the USA, and the Old West of which he wrote had, to the extent that it ever had any basis in reality, mostly passed away. Yet many of his young readers identified his fictional hero Old Shatterhand with May himself. His contemporaries accused the old con artist of encouraging this error.
Sadly, I fairly quickly became dissatisfied with May's works. I eventually moved on to Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, Gruppenbild mit Dame, and other similarly weighty German works, which were far better, even if they took me months to read. But I still look back to May with affection, more for his absurdity than literary merit.