Prince Ishmael

Prince Ishmael is gorgeously written book about Caspar Hauser, the enigmatic foundling who wandered into Nuremberg in the early 19th century. Hauser caused a sensation in Europe, becoming a celebrity and provoking wildly contradictory responses in people. Many thought he was a fraud, some thought he was a Prince, others an angel. Marianne Hauser plays with each of these. Because Caspar Hauser is the narrator, we see all events filtered through his bewitchingly innocent mind. He arrives a virtual blank slate, with a note pinned to his filthy rags. He has been kept for 16 years in a hole, not allowed to see faces or much light at all, fed only bread and water. One day, for reasons he doesn't know, his keeper releases him. For three years he is the ward of the state, kept first in a jail, which he finds comfortable and comforting, and then by a series of 'fathers', teachers who are hired to educated and civilize him. He adores the attention of aristocrats, attending their balls, is doted on by young rich women, who, like Titania and Bottom, lavish him with kisses and attention. Everything is an adventure to him and no event, no detail is unimportant. Marianne Hauser renders his world in great detail, drenched with color and teeming with sound. The pastoral elements, Caspar's springlike innocence, enchant the reader. But it is a tragic story, without resolution, for despite Caspar's ceaseless self exploration he can never solve his own mystery, and the world, seen through his eyes, is a mystery too. Like Dostoyevsky's Prince Mishkin, he is eventually undone by the fallen world. Caspar Hauser is stabbed through the heart one day in a park in a snowstorm. Was it the English Lord, Lord Whatsworth, a fraud and a friend, possibly lover, of Caspar's? A Stranger? Or, as many are convinced, Caspar himself? We will never know. This is Marianne Hauser's masterpiece, a great novel, absorbing, written in her unique style. источник.