I was reorganizing the library's German Romantic literature section on a slow Tuesday afternoon - the kind of afternoon where the fluorescent lights hum and exactly three patrons come in, two of whom are just using the bathroom - when I put Master Flea on through my earbuds and basically didn't look up for the next two hours.
Here's the thing about E.T.A. Hoffmann: people know him the way they know a distant relative. Oh yes, The Nutcracker guy. The guy who inspired that Offenbach opera. They don't actually sit with his work. And Master Flea - published the same year he died, 1822 - is not the Hoffmann most people imagine. It's not the gothic dread of The Sandman. It's weirder. Funnier. More chaotic. A young man named Peregrinus Tyss falls into an absurd adventure involving a microscopic flea king, a femme fatale who may or may not be a supernatural entity, a magical lens that lets you read people's thoughts, and a subplot that got Hoffmann in actual legal trouble with the Prussian government because he was clearly satirizing a real official. The plot doesn't so much resolve as it sort of... exhausts itself. And I mean that with genuine affection.
The Narrator Who Understood the Assignment
Bob Neufeld gets it. And I want to be specific about what "getting it" means here, because it's not obvious.
Master Flea is narrated in a style that keeps winking at itself. Hoffmann will stop the story to announce, with complete deadpan sincerity, something like: "It is an established custom, that when the hero of a tale is under any violent agitation, he should run out into a forest..." - and then proceed to do exactly that. It's meta before meta was a thing. It requires a narrator who can deliver that kind of line with a straight face and a barely-suppressed smirk simultaneously. Neufeld does this. His timing on Hoffmann's self-aware asides feels organic, not performed. He doesn't lean into the joke so hard it collapses, and he doesn't underplay it so much it disappears.
The pacing is genuinely good - which matters more than it sounds for a text this structurally chaotic. Hoffmann's prose has this quality of starting one thing and then suddenly being somewhere else entirely, like a dream that keeps rerouting itself. A lesser narrator would make that feel like a slog. Neufeld makes it feel like the point. One listener quote I came across nailed it: the interjections and jumps "felt natural for a fairy tale." Yes. Exactly. He's not fighting the text. He's riding it.
Is it a flawless performance? The research I found doesn't flag anything egregious - no mispronunciations, no tonal collapses - but it's also not the kind of narration that makes you stop and think how did he do that. It's a solid, smart, appropriately theatrical reading of a difficult text. That's not nothing. That's actually quite a lot.
Where the Book Itself Gets Slippery
I'll be honest: the back half loses some coherence. The magical lens storyline and the Peregrinus romance and the flea king mythology don't braid together as neatly as Hoffmann probably intended - or maybe intended to be messy, who knows. There's a reason one listener said the plot had them "on the floor" while another said they didn't care for the story at all but kept listening anyway because of Neufeld. Both reactions are completely valid and somehow both correct.
For horror listeners coming here from my podcast: this is not horror. There are eerie elements - the thought-reading lens has something genuinely unsettling about it, the idea that you could see the petty, selfish machinery behind every person's face - but Hoffmann is playing this for absurdist comedy, not dread. The Sandman this is not. If you want the Hoffmann that disturbed Freud enough to write an essay about it, go elsewhere. If you want the Hoffmann who was apparently a chaotic gremlin of a human being who wrote fairy tales while also being a lawyer and a composer and probably several other things, this is your book.
At 5 hours and 25 minutes, it's a short commitment. The audio quality is clean. And the LibriVox origins mean it's freely available if you want to test the waters before investing. The LibriVox catalog is genuinely one of the better rabbit holes I've fallen into — I ended up there after reviewing Short Science Fiction Collection 029, which has that same patchwork, curated-by-enthusiasts energy that makes free audio feel like a gift rather than a compromise.
Check This Out If...
You love German Romantic literature and want to go deeper than the ballet adaptations. You enjoy stories that are aware they're stories and find that charming rather than annoying. You're the kind of listener who can forgive a convoluted ending because the ride was genuinely strange and fun. You want something that feels like a very old fever dream narrated by someone who clearly finds the whole thing as delightful as you do.
Skip it if you need narrative tidiness. Or if you came for gothic horror. Or if you have no patience for a plot that occasionally forgets what it was doing mid-sentence (affectionately, but still).
Shirley was asleep in my book bag the whole time. She had no notes. I had a lot.
