In the Library
Elective Affinities
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1809
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 7 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by James Anthony Froude and R. Dillon Boylan (1854)
- Original
- Original de
- Chapters
- Chapters 36
- Length
- Length 97k words
£1.99
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None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
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Effi Briest does the same thing, but ices the temperature down further, turning German marital catastrophe into something even quieter and more clinically observed.
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Madame Bovary
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Madame Bovary does the same thing, but swaps Goethe's cool scientific metaphor for the fevered, self-deceiving interior of a woman starved by provincial life.
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About the book
The Captain sketches a chemical law at the drawing-room table: bring two compounds together and each abandons its partner for a stronger new bond. Charlotte listens, and hears the diagram describe her own marriage before anyone has so much as touched. Four people share a country estate, held there by vows, kindness, real affection, and then discover that desire obeys a force as blind and exact as the one in the Captain's demonstration. Eduard turns toward the young Ottilie; Charlotte toward the Captain. Goethe's coldest, most beautiful stroke is to make the heart a laboratory and then ask the unanswerable question: is love a choice, or only a reaction? A child is conceived by husband and wife on a night when each imagines someone else, and is born wearing the faces of the two who were never in the room. From there the novel moves with the quiet inevitability of a law being obeyed, toward a renunciation so complete it still stops the breath.