After making the enormous claim that "German prose literature really excels in short stories and novellas," Michael Dirda goes on to say
No, before
Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, there are really only
a handful of German novels that ordinary people still read, and all of
them are short. In fact,
Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen (about a medieval poet's quest for the unattainable "blue flower") and
Holderlin's Hyperion
(an account, in letters, of a young Greek's ecstatic and sorrowful
coming of age) are so intense and rhapsodic that they might be called
prose poems -- but what else would you expect from the two finest
German romantic poets? Only
Theodore Fontane's Effi Briest, which
Samuel Beckett so ardently admired (there are allusions to it in "Krapp's Last Tape"), seriously rivals
Elective Affinities in scope and artistry.
We're still reading Buddenbrooks, and enjoying it, and Elective Affinities sounds like an excellent follow-up:
Elective Affinities -- the title refers to
the chemical attraction of elements -- is, above all, an elegant book,
with something of the stylized formality of a baroque opera by Gluck or
one of Watteau's paintings of a fête galante. The modern
reader will need to slow down to appreciate its somewhat austere
beauty. The narration is unemotional, heavily descriptive, and by
contemporary best-seller standards, even somewhat colorless and flat.
Similarly, the principal characters always maintain the strictest
decorousness, no matter how turbid their emotions. Many of them don't
even merit personal names -- they are called simply the Captain, the
Baron, the Countess, the Architect, the Tutor. An air of fatedness
hangs over the action; there are symbols galore (paths, water, the
changing seasons, an unbroken goblet, birthdays and anniversaries); and
Goethe keeps his overall tone serenely august. So don't expect the
sparkle and wit of a Jane Austen.