Amazing, amazing, amazing book.

This was such a dark, sad, despairing story on so many levels that it has taken me over a year to finish it. I wanted to get through it because it is his last novel, but I'm not sure I made the right choice.

A friend sent me a link to the entire book online. It's from Mark
Twain's dark period towards the end of his life. Don't look up
anything before you just read it, since it's so short. It really makes me want to read more Twain, because his just my "type" -- beautiful prose (very modern feeling) and heavy content. It starts off in a small
isolated village in Austria and tells about these three boys that
befriend a mysterious stranger with powers that end up causing a bit
of a ruckus in the remote and "middle ages" style fanatically religious locale. The setting feels like Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude and the way the narration feels like a Grimm's fairy tale or C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. It's short! Tell me if you want the link!

A fairly straightforward piece of antireligious misanthropy. Not terribly witty or particularly eloquent, but decent enough.

wow, um bleak.

This short story is a deeply disturbing account of the human condition as seen through the eyes of Satan himself. Cynical, dark, pessimistic, and dreary, there is no warmth, only cruelty contained in these pages. Eight thousand year old Satan and narrator Theodor are the main characters. Friends Seppi and Nikolaus are secondary, along with an astrologer, and two priests, Father Adolph and Father Peter. The setting is winter, 1590, in isolated Eseldorf, Austria.

Witchcraft, superstitions, and sorcery are very much a part of this society. Satan is a fallen angel, with no empathy nor mercy. He kills with impunity, has no regrets, and harbors great distain for the human race. He disparages what he calls Moral Sense as being frivolous and uninformed. Kindness and ethics have no place in his thinking. “Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider—he cannot get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent.”

This account, written so many years ago by Mark Twain, sounds chillingly prescient in light of the current political environment. "Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race—the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you.”

To an atheist, this account may not be surprising nor depressing. But to a person of faith, it is anathema. “There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

Twain gone uber-cynical. I'm usually a fan of his writing, but this book (written toward the end of his life & after a series of financial & emotional trials) culminates with a hopeless view of life. No god, no eternity, and life as nothingness. Intriguing, but sad :/

Ahhh qué mamón y basado que sos Satanás, me caes bien. nwn