A review by dillonrockrohr
Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

3.0

A difficult book to rate. I enjoyed reading it a little more than I expected to. I’m no expert on the literature of this period—and it’s the first Goethe I’ve completed—but I imagine many of the techniques he uses here were innovative or at least rare at the time. A multi-perspective novel, softly and slowly meditating on a metaphysical idea, an Enlightenment/Romantic notion of fate (voluntary but indelible), including paratextual elements. Tbh I wish we got more Mittler.