The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories

Doesn't seem like a rating would be appropriate for this piece. It's been meddled with, is unfinished, and is only one version of what Twain had been working on.I do wish he'd lived to finish this. The background story and setting do have some significance, but they don't offer much more value than their functioning as signals for the context of Satan's philosophy (Faust–not just Goethe's work, but the legend itself; Schiller's [b:Die Räuber 942336 Die Räuber Friedrich Schiller https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1179652399s/942336.jpg 6226708]; Hegel/Nietzsche).I also wish I had a more recent understanding of some of Twain's finished works so maybe I could imagine what The Mysterious Stranger could have been. Theodor and Satan are the two most prominent characters, but almost nothing(and yet everything) happens to/in Theodor. Everything about the plot is abrupt. The form and endless talk of “dreaming” (and Satan's alternate name: “Philip Traum” – shoutout to /lit/ for memeing [b:Zettels Traum 6761655 Zettels Traum Arno Schmidt https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1365691063s/6761655.jpg 6265305], which is the only reason I picked up on that) do make me think that Twain wanted to write The Mysterious Stranger as a dream, but I think dream-like works need to have intensely emotional content (e.g., David Lynch). The Mysterious Stranger feels much more like a sort of [b:Thus Spoke Zarathustra 51893 Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1480901846s/51893.jpg 196327]-type frame for a set of philosophical aphorisms. The weakness of the story/setting does work with the whole “[i]t is all a dream–a grotesque and foolish dream” idea, but that kind of feels like making excuses for ineffective/uninteresting writing. Would have been more interesting and cutting if written in the style of [b:La Chute 774027 La Chute Albert Camus https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1356291219s/774027.jpg 3324245] ( which of course, wasn't written until half a century later) or something more forcefully absurd and personal like Kafka's [b:A Country Doctor 221524 A Country Doctor Franz Kafka https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1366803130s/221524.jpg 907551], [b:Description of a Struggle 1873712 Description of a Struggle Franz Kafka https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1341595345s/1873712.jpg 46240676], or [b:Before the Law 9682386 Before the Law (The Metamorphosis, A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories) Franz Kafka https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1289573498s/9682386.jpg 19169658].Anyway, lines like “you are but a thought–a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!” – that's my jam (no, I do not know why). There's a lot of that here, so I liked it.

Amazing book. Mark Twain had some fascinating insights into how humans function amongst themselves.