Every Christmas, American television shows It's A Wonderful Life at least once. For many people, the movie is the Christmas must watch. (Note, not for me. That's Rudolph or Nestor the Long Eared Donkey or the Muppet Christmas Carol or Sim's Christmas Carol). In some ways, Life is the American Christmas Carol. It heavily colors views about angels too.

So, if you like It's A Wonderful Life, you shouldn't read this work.

This Kindle edition includes the title short novel as well as three short stories, of which only one, "A Fable" I enjoyed.

But Stranger is the star. Twain's story is about an angel named Satan who visits a town in Austria and meets some boys.

The angel isn't very much like the modern view of angels (Emma Thompson in [b:Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes|72003|Angels in America A Gay Fantasia on National Themes|Tony Kushner|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170797663s/72003.jpg|1014201]). Twains uses the angel (or is it?) to examine human culture, morals, behavior, life, and it is un-angelic to say the lest, even that of the narrator.

Twain's never really been a favorite of mine. I'm not really sure why. Perhaps if I had read this story before anything else.

An interesting story of a young man's interactions with the nephew of Satan, conveniently called Satan also. The story begins with a backdrop of the life of father Peter who is discredited for preaching of the goodness of God. Later on we see how Satan begins describing the nature of the human race and how frivolous their behavior can be to each other.

Religious themes over abound in this work and many connections to scripture stories are made.

In particular, I enjoyed the story of the woman who is accused of healing by using natural remedies(due to witch fear) and who is put to death meanwhile those in the audience throw rocks at her.

This story reminded me of Jesus and the adulterous woman brought to him for stoning. Satan takes this opportunity to explain how the minority can influence the majority to act in strange ways. In a way it is only Satan who judge the heart and noticed how most didn't want to throw rocks, but they were influenced by those around them.

Since this is my first Mark Twain book, I find that this kind of story has many morals interleaved between its pages that can be missed.

Hopefully, I can read more of his works.

Very curious. Wish Twain had been able to publish the finished work before his death. I wonder how it would've turned it.
Regardless, this edition at least was an interesting read. Interesting, to say the least.

Twain's last novel.

What a remarkable piece of writing from a man known for his subtle mind. This is an almost unknown novella, one that has been shunted off stage in favor of the luminous Huck Finn, the multifarious Roughing It and Innocents Abroad, and is considered part of Twain's "dark period" because it doesn't adhere to our expectations of his style. I'm deeply fascinated by Twain's manifold aspects as a writer, and this interesting novella illuminates one of them. Many have dismissed this nihilistic, atheistic story as the work of an emotionally exhausted and broken man, who had suffered ruinous financial losses and the death of beloved family members, one after the other. I find this dismissal deeply condescending and moralistic. In fact, Twain was a critic of religion from his earliest writings, most memorably in Huck Finn.

While The Mysterious Stranger's narrative framework is unconventional, even if fable-like, its lucid and unsparing criticism of religious belief at a time when such criticism would have been career-endangering, is frankly wonderful and profoundly emotional. Twain set this fable in fifteenth-century Austria in order to gain closer access to the most horrific aspects of inquisitorial religious authority, but it reads as if it could have happened in St. Petersburg, Missouri. (In fact, there is a "St. Petersburg" fragment associated with this book.) Some readers looking for the kind of rich, detailed setting one finds in Twain's other work will be sorely disappointed. Humor is sparse here (notable exception is the name of the town, Eseldorf, or "ass/donkey town"). As a devoted admirer of Mark Twain, I found in this novella a important pathway toward better understanding him, as well as an affirmation of some of my own core beliefs, which are rarely reflected in the literature contemporaneous with Twain.

An important last note: The copy of this novella I checked out from my library was actually the 1916 publication, which was cobbled together by Albert Bigelow Paine, who had sole possession of Twain's papers at that time. In an attempt to smooth out a piece in revision, he made some additions. Be sure to read the version found in the University of California's definitive collection of Mysterious Stranger manuscripts titled "No.44, The Mysterious Stranger."