Elective Affinities
Elective Affinities was written when Goethe was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. This is a new edition of his penetrating study of marriage and passion, bringing together four people in an inexorable manner. The novel asks whether we have free will or not and confronts its...
show more
Elective Affinities was written when Goethe was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. This is a new edition of his penetrating study of marriage and passion, bringing together four people in an inexorable manner. The novel asks whether we have free will or not and confronts its characters with the monstrous consequences of repressing what little "real life" they have in themselves, a life so far removed from their natural states that it appears to them as something terrible and destructive.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780192837769 (0192837761)
Publish date: March 4th 1999
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Pages no: 272
Edition language: English
Introduction--Elective AffinitiesChronologyFurther Reading
Con tutto il rispetto per Goethe, ma a me questo libro proprio non è piaciuto. È scritto con un tono pomposo e ha un finale orribile.
I found a few very helpful notes in the Penguin Classics introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, although the introduction in this edition (by David Constantine) is much more thorough from a lit crit angle.
I read this beautiful novel in German. Though I might have objected to how structured it is, so full of symbols and echoes, in the hands of a master like Goethe it only contributes to the subtle atmosphere. What's more, the characters are individual and detailed, as comes out through their interacti...
Herr Goethe definitely had a passion for drama and tragedy. Except this time she dies but, don't cry yet, he joins her in death (gothic, right?) and "Thus the lovers lie sleeping side by side ; peace hovers above their resting-place ; fair angel faces gaze down upon them from aloft. And what happine...
Log in with Facebook 
