Elective affinities
Elective Affinitieswas written when Goethe was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. This is a new edition of his penetrating study of marriage and passion, bringing together four people in an inexorable manner. The novel asks whether we have free will or not and confronts its characters with the monstrous consequences of repressing what little "real life" they have in themselves, a life so far removed from their natural states that it appears to them as something terrible and destructive.
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What Hacker News says
- I read a buttload of Goethe in high school in Germany, we were always rolling our eyes when every year we'd go through another one of his plays or poems. Admittedly, a lot of his stuff is quite good though. I really like "Die Wahlverwandschaften" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_Affinities), it sounds dry if you read the summary but quite an entertaining read. I don't know how good the translation is.
I don't really get poetry in general but somehow in song form it works really well. I LOVE a lot of the songs from the 19th century, somehow the overwrought lyrics are perfect in that form.
- Also see: https://www.newyorker.com/books/book-currents/francis-ford-c...
With comments from Coppola about Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, but also Cao Xueqin's The Dream of the Red Chamber, William Bolitho's Twelve Against the Gods, Cole and Chinoy's project Directors on Directing, and Goethe's Elective Affinities
- It's hard to overstate the importance of Goethe to German culture and literature. He was a brilliant man with a lively mind. One nonfiction work of his I quite enjoyed is his Theory of Colours[1]. While many dismiss it as "wrong" because it isn't a correct physical theory of wavelengths and spectrum, that's not the point. It's really about the perception of color, which is psychology and not physics.
On a similar note, Elective Affinities[2] is a novel about human relationships that is inspired by chemistry. To this day even in English we refer to two persons as having "chemistry" together.
