The Continuation of Simplicissimus

Author: Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

Translator: Mike Mitchell   Cover design: Marie Lane  

The Continuation is Grimmelshausen's 'pilgrim's progress', the concluding chapter in one of the greatest and most acclaimed German novels. It combines fantastic episodes with a realistic narrative style.

At the end of his original adventures his hero withdraws from the world to live as a hermit in the Black Forest. Now, after a vivid dream of the Devil and all his minions at work, he decides to become a pilgrim and visit the holy places, making his way, with various encounters, across Switzerland to Italy, where he takes passage on a ship to Egypt. Outside Cairo he is captured by Arab robbers who take him to the Red Sea, exhibiting him as a wild man from the desert. Rescued by European merchants, he embarks on a ship to return home via the Cape of Good Hope, but the ship is wrecked and, 50 years before Robinson Crusoe, he is marooned on a desert island.