cover image The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris

The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris

Ernst Pawel. Farrar Straus Giroux, $23 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-374-23538-3

The late Pawel, award-winning biographer of Kafka (The Nightmare of Reason), has written a penetrating study of the great poet (1797-1856). The ``enfant terrible of German letters'' (Nietzsche said, ``He possessed that divine malice without which I cannot conceive of perfection''), Heine was an elegant poet and unsparing journalist. His poetry, shaped by banishment from a Germany hostile to his Jewishness and to his pointed irreverence, flourished in Paris. As mysterious ill health overtook him in the last eight years of his life, confining him to his ``mattress tomb,'' Heine confronted death in strikingly understated, carefully controlled verse. He retained his sardonic sense of humor as well: ``It is already expensive enough to live in Paris. But dying in Paris is infinitely more expensive. And to think that I could now be hanged for free in Germany or in Hungary.'' With an appendix of Heine's poems in German and English. (Sept.)