Elective Affinities (Penguin Classics)

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Author), R.J. Hollingdale (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1978

  $13.79

  Eduard and Charlotte are an aristocratic couple who live a harmonious but idle life in their estate. But the peace of their existence is thrown into chaos when two visitors - Eduard's friend the Captain and Charlotte's passionate young ward Ottilie - provoke unexpected attraction and forbidden love. Taking its title from the principle of elective affinities - the theory that certain chemicals are naturally drawn to one another - this is a penetrating study of marriage and adultery. Inspired by Goethe's own conflicting loyalties as he battled to maintain his relationship with his wife and control his feelings for a younger woman, Elective Affinities is one of the greatest works of the romance era: a rich exploration of love, conflict, and the inescapable force of fate.

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $8.16

  Goethe conducts an experiment with the lives of people who are living badly. Charlotte and Eduard, aristocrats with little to occupy them, invite Ottilie and the Captain into their lives - against morality, good sense and conscious volition all four are drawn into relationships as inexorably as if they were substances in a chemical equation. The novel asks whether there is free will or not. More disturbingly, it confronts its characters with the monstrous consequences of their repression of any real life in themselves. It seems that they are sunk so far in convention, fear and unnaturalness that a real life, or even the beginnings of one, must appear to them as something terrible and destructive. Goethe wrote Elective Affinities when he was 60 and long established as Germany's literary giant. He remained an uneasy and scandalous figure. David Constantine is the translator of Holderlein's Selected Poems .