This new translation seems very good. The narration was excellent! ( )

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The relentlessly feverish, almost melodramatic, tone of obsessive and largely unrequited love doesn't quite cut the mustard in these more circumspect times. Nevertheless an interesting journey into how Goethe fabricates/constructs a mercifully short story. Mind you, there is a temperamental precondition that sets this tone. I picked this up after reading the biography, Emerson - the Mind on Fire. where I was interested in how 'nature' was perceived. For Goethe's character Werther nature is a condition where...

There is not one moment that does not wear you away, and those who are close to you, nor any one moment when you yourself are not a destroyer, of necessity: the most innocent of walks costs thousands of wretched grubs their lives, one step wrecks what the ant laboriously built and trads a little world into an ignominious grave underfoot... and all I can see is a monster forever devouring, regurgitating, chewing and gorging.

I'm not a fan of epistolary novels. It was interesting to have the author intervene at one point. If, like Tolstoy, he had intervened more often with wider speculations about the characters and actions it may well have been a more durable piece. ( )

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I listened to this on audiobook. Really not my kind of book. I understand that it's a product of its time, and I don't think Goethe was trying to show Goethe as some sort of hero. I think he was trying to show a tragic situation. Still, through no fault of Goethe's own, this is a tired tropey story for me after all the time inbetween then and now, and I did not like it. I can't wait to read Faust though!! ( )