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softlywander 's review for:
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I want to write novels about this book. Actually, others have already. Well, not precisely, but Mary Shelley did include "Sorrows" in the trio of books that the Monster finds in the portmanteau in the woods, alongside Milton's Paradise Lost and Plutarch's Lives.
I now know why.
This is an incredibly sensory and heartfelt collection of letters from "a young unstable man," Werther, who falls in love with an engaged woman.
Goethe (whom I adore) explores and gives commentary on societal duties and expectations, happiness and depression, devoted and unrequited love, and suicide, which fascinates me. Goethe wrote this in four weeks when he was 24 and went through a difficult time, and the passion and wildly fluctuating emotions of Werther are both invigorating and dispiriting in turn. The novel is relatively short for the level complexity and number of ideas it conveys, and feels a weighty semblance to Shelley's Frankenstein, in atmosphere if not entirely in tone.
This is a tragedy in the vein and spirit of Hamlet, and the moment it ended I wanted to start it again.
Please try and read this book.
I now know why.
This is an incredibly sensory and heartfelt collection of letters from "a young unstable man," Werther, who falls in love with an engaged woman.
Goethe (whom I adore) explores and gives commentary on societal duties and expectations, happiness and depression, devoted and unrequited love, and suicide, which fascinates me. Goethe wrote this in four weeks when he was 24 and went through a difficult time, and the passion and wildly fluctuating emotions of Werther are both invigorating and dispiriting in turn. The novel is relatively short for the level complexity and number of ideas it conveys, and feels a weighty semblance to Shelley's Frankenstein, in atmosphere if not entirely in tone.
This is a tragedy in the vein and spirit of Hamlet, and the moment it ended I wanted to start it again.
Please try and read this book.