It seems like some sort of literary sin not to like this book, but I don’t. Werther is a sensitive and romantic young man, quite clearly modelled on the author. Unfortunately, he’s an insufferable little prig. The plot turns on him meeting and falling in love with Lotte who is already engaged and being so unable to deal with the implications of this that his entire life is thrown into chaos. It’s not this that is difficult to believe; it’s the ridiculous reverence he has for her, and his supposed ‘purity’ of feeling. There is nothing erotic about his love, although it feels like there should be. Instead it’s a kind of spiritual worship that it quite difficult to stomach.
It’s an epistolary novel, but all the letters are from Werther and because of this each one has a slightly false ring – Goethe needs to fill us in on what the intervening letters have said without actually supplying them. As a result Werther is a little too punctilious in referring to them. Some of the letters are pages long, while others are only a few lines. One irritation of this edition is the number of footnotes that link the novel back to Goethe’s life, making it part of the ‘based on a true story’ plague.
The Sorrows of Young Werther is a tremendously influential novel (Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar was inspired by it, among others) and it seems to have a deep resonance in Germany, inspiring something like the reverence that we feel for Shakespeare.
Maybe it’s one I’ll have to reread in a few years’ time.
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