Bob's review
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This book contains Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella. Novella is a kind of Aesop's Fable. You know the one about the lion with the thorn in its paw? Enough said about that.
Werther is an epistolary novel that was all the rage in 1774. Started the Sturm und Drang period, which was early Romanticism. Werther was okay. A bit hard to connect with why it was such a blockbuster back then. A lot of similar stuff has been written since, so one is somewhat anaesthetized to it.
There are quotable segments to it here and there. The segment which I most identified with was this:
...the blossoms of life are only phantoms. How many fade, leaving no trace behind; how few bear fruit, and how few of those fruits ripen!
It reminds me of a nature show I saw when I was a teenager about how many eggs are laid by fish that never hatch, and of those that hatch, how many are devoured by predators before they can reproduce. It taught me that waste is...more
Werther is an epistolary novel that was all the rage in 1774. Started the Sturm und Drang period, which was early Romanticism. Werther was okay. A bit hard to connect with why it was such a blockbuster back then. A lot of similar stuff has been written since, so one is somewhat anaesthetized to it.
There are quotable segments to it here and there. The segment which I most identified with was this:
...the blossoms of life are only phantoms. How many fade, leaving no trace behind; how few bear fruit, and how few of those fruits ripen!
It reminds me of a nature show I saw when I was a teenager about how many eggs are laid by fish that never hatch, and of those that hatch, how many are devoured by predators before they can reproduce. It taught me that waste is...more
