In the Library
Green Henry
Gottfried Keller, 1855
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 19 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 40
- Length
- Length 269k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
My father was a farmer's son from a very ancient village, which takes its name from a family that has vanished for many centuries.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Dickens also follows a gifted, dreamy boy from a fatherless home out into the world and back through failure, but Keller ends not on a triumph but on a grave.
£1.99
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
Joyce also tells the making of an artist from childhood on, with a religious upbringing thrown off, but Keller's hero is far less sure of himself.
£1.99
About the book
Dyed from his dead father's old coat, the clothes that give Heinrich Lee his childhood nickname follow him into every room he enters, marking him as the boy raised alone on his mother's exhausted love. Gottfried Keller spent years failing as a landscape painter before he wrote this novel, and every stroke of Heinrich's own failed vocation carries the ache of a man forgiving himself for it. Heinrich leaves Zurich certain he will be a great painter; Munich teaches him only how far talent falls short of longing, while at home his mother sells what little she has and wears herself down to nothing keeping his dream alive. He comes home too poor and too late. She is already gone, worn out by the waiting, and the debt he owes her cannot be painted or written or apologized into any easier shape. Few books have made ambition look so much like a slow, loving theft. Keller does not let Heinrich off; he makes you watch a son learn, one ruined canvas at a time, what his mother's devotion actually cost.