Talk:Bleak House

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Please ID a Book with a similar Title

Back in college, I remember reading a short story (or Novella - about 80 pages long - it may have been edited down, but was meant for native speakers of German) with a remarkably similar title - Das Öde Haus (The Bleak House) but I can't remember the author, and it surely wasn't Charles Dickens. In Das Öde Haus, a man rents out a flat in a rather run-down house, and one day notices a tiny sound coming out of the corner of his room. Intrigued, he listens for it day after day, until he can pick up a rather small voice that seems to speak to him directly. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart, the tiny sound or voice starts out unintelligible, but begins to make sense with time, until it has finally impressed upon him the urgency of doing favors for it, and ultimately having to obey it. (Not a good idea if you have to keep paying the rent, I guess, as he was ultimately thrown out for nonpayment of rent, if my memory serves me right.)

Can anybody identify this story from the description above? And even more important, who was its author? It's not Charles Dickens.

Google says that E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote a story called "Das Ode Haus" (probably published in Der Sandmann). His WP article has a link to Gutenburg - try there? JackyR 14:40, 30 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! You've been very helpful!

E.T.A. Hoffmann appears to have written the story in 1817, a year after he published Der Sandmann.

Excerpt Says Little

The following quotation from the book originally formed the body of the article, but obviously says nothing about the book.

(Quotation)

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here - as here he is - with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains [...] and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be - as here they are - mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might.