I read Faust in college, which is Goethe’s most well-known work. I don’t remember much about it other than I didn’t like it, which may not have really been Goethe’s fault. I was anti-Goethe right off the bat because my professor insisted on pronouncing his name with a pretentious German accent. I know it’s wrong, but it would be better for me if his name rhymed with “both.” Sorry Germany. Because of this, I wasn't looking forward to reading Werther, but it was better than I expected.Werther is an epistolary novel, which means it’s written as a series of letters (another epistolary novel recently read and enjoyed: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society... so good. I should write about it). Most translations use the title The Sorrows of Young Werther, but the version I read was called The Sufferings of Young Werther. I like the word “suffering” better because I think it’s more indicative of Werther’s pain.
The basic premise is that Werther is a young artist who falls instantly and madly in love with Lotte, who is already engaged to be married to Albert. The story unfolds as Werther writes very detailed, intimate letters to a friend, and we learn that he’s an incredibly emotionally unstable guy. He just can’t stay away from Lotte, and his obsession is all-encompassing. Eventually, when he can no longer stand the pain he’s causing both himself and Lotte, he briefly considers murdering either her or Albert, but instead commits suicide. Heavy stuff.
The whole time I was reading this and thinking about Werther as a character, I was imaging it as an episode of some cop show on TV. I picture Werther as this sort of creepy, stalker guy who’s totally obsessed with some girl. Her husband ends up murdered, and Werther is the prime suspect. Remember the weird brother kid in Wedding Crashers? Werther would totally be played by that guy. A lot could be said about Werther’s character and all his faults. Yeah, he’s a little ridiculous, and he’s way over-dramatic, but when you really start to look at Lotte’s character, you realize that she is just as much at fault. She has to know that Werther is unstable, but she encourages him and likes the attention. It says that she wants him to marry one of her friends so he’ll always be around. It kinda makes me not like her, even though of course she’s written about very sympathetically by Werther in his letters. He thinks she’s practically an angel. I feel like she’s the girl we all know who is in a relationship but still wants to keep other guys around just to make herself feel better. It’s not fair to anyone. At times I felt sorry for Werther and even embarrassed for him.
I make fun of it, but this book is really actually pretty good, and its cultural impact was definitely reflective of it being a good story. Werther was written in 1774 and was one of the early impetuses of the entire Romanticism movement. It’s a story out of a completely different time, when over-the-top romantic sensitivity and passionate expression were more normal than we’re used to now. Werther is generally considered Goethe’s semi-autobiograhpy, with a lot of similarities to his own life, as well as the life of one of his close friends who committed suicide after a failed relationship. Because of this, I think it allowed Goethe to put even more feeling and real, raw emotion into the story, especially since it’s almost entirely written in Werther’s first person view.This isn’t the most fun you’ll ever have reading. That’s for sure. And I wouldn’t recommend it to most people for that reason, but it’s definitely well-written and gives you something to think about.
Up next: Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie ... but first, maybe something a little more beachy :)
No comments:
Post a Comment