Scan barcode
A review by carmenx9
The New Sorrows of Young W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf
5.0
4.5 stars - this book was on my to-read list for six years - and I finished it in three days (it's my own fault: I missed the fact that the English translation came out in 2015, and I think the Goethe didn't take me longer than a week either. If there's a bigger idiot that Edgar Wibeau, it might be me).
Thankfully, New Sorrows is one I'll come back to. If you're not on board with The Sorrows of Young Werther or Catcher in the Rye, you won't get on with this book, but thankfully I fit this description pretty neatly so it was very much my thing. If the book suffers from anything it's that the references and subversions of Goethe and Salinger are omnipresent, and I spent most of the read in a maddening connect-the-dots activity compounded by its strong sense of time and place.
But the novel's biggest strength comes straight out of the gate by subverting the original's famous ending and narrative structure - instead of letters, we get tapes, and Edgar is a feisty commentator on his own purposefully ambiguous death. If The Sorrows of Young Werther was the proto-Romantic reactionary piece off the back of the Enlightenment, The New Sorrows of Young W. is in the same spirit, capturing the futility of finding purpose outside of societally accepted channels. I And as sardonic and irreverent as it gets, Edgar (and Plenzdorf) underpin these observations with sincerity, and it's surprisingly moving.
I read the 2015 Romy Fursland translation (the only English translation?) - I've heard nothing can quite capture the original dialect / GDR slang, but until I learn German this is the closest I'm going to get.
Would recommend, but it may be a strange read without any context!
Thankfully, New Sorrows is one I'll come back to. If you're not on board with The Sorrows of Young Werther or Catcher in the Rye, you won't get on with this book, but thankfully I fit this description pretty neatly so it was very much my thing. If the book suffers from anything it's that the references and subversions of Goethe and Salinger are omnipresent, and I spent most of the read in a maddening connect-the-dots activity compounded by its strong sense of time and place.
But the novel's biggest strength comes straight out of the gate by subverting the original's famous ending and narrative structure - instead of letters, we get tapes, and Edgar is a feisty commentator on his own purposefully ambiguous death. If The Sorrows of Young Werther was the proto-Romantic reactionary piece off the back of the Enlightenment, The New Sorrows of Young W. is in the same spirit, capturing the futility of finding purpose outside of societally accepted channels. I And as sardonic and irreverent as it gets, Edgar (and Plenzdorf) underpin these observations with sincerity, and it's surprisingly moving.
I read the 2015 Romy Fursland translation (the only English translation?) - I've heard nothing can quite capture the original dialect / GDR slang, but until I learn German this is the closest I'm going to get.
Would recommend, but it may be a strange read without any context!