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The clenched teeth metaphor is apt. Michael Kohlhaas is a character I found myself personally identifying with - in a mixture of envy, doom and fear. And von Kleist is able to make compelling arguments, at the same time and in the same prose, for him being both painfully right and painfully wrong in his choices.
But read the actual story before reading this piece, IMHO.
Also note that the full text of a different (older?) translation is available online, e.g. here:
As a German, I consider Kleist one of my favorite authors. If Goethe’s writing represents the language at its most beautiful, Kleist’s German is a German that is allowed to follow its natural tendencies to the bitter end: as the article puts it, it is a “dispassionate accounting”, but it is extremely powerful. When I read the scene in which Michael Kohlhaas and his men storm the bad guy’s castle for the first time, I felt like I was in a Tarantino movie. I highly recommend watching his plays if you can, although I can’t judge any translations. I had the good fortune of seeing Johan Simons’ production of Penthesilea, which, being a two-person show, follows the play only loosely, but it was incredible.
“Kleist’s voice is an absolute singularity. Historicizing it won’t do – even in his own time noone wrote like him.” —Thomas Mann