Category: German Literature

Fragments of Pain – W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants

The Emigrants is the second novel by W.G. Sebald, the late German academic who was based at the University of East Anglia, that I have read after Austerlitz. I read Austerlitz a few weeks ago and was not as affected by it as I felt I was supposed to be, and so I decided not to write a post about it. The Emigrants is concerned with many of the same themes as Austerlitz – memory, trauma, and the like – but it explores them in a way that was slightly more approachable and, as a result, more impactful. Sebald is a pretty unique phenomenon, and even if the horrors of central Europe’s twentieth century do not interest you, his way of writing about them is another reason to read him.

Austerlitz tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, a man who discovers at the end of his schooldays that he is not the Welshman he thought he was, but a Jew from the Prague. This leads him to an odyssey of discovery as he tries to find out the truth of his origins, and whatever became of his parents. Austerlitz’s story comes to us mediated through a narrator who meets Austerlitz over the course of several years, often by complete chance. The Emigrants adopts a similar approach, but because it is made up of four short stories, ranging in length from under thirty pages to almost one hundred, the stories end up easier to follow, and their characters are a little easier to believe in.

Each of the stories focuses on a different émigré, emigrant, or exile, from the lands inhabited by the Jews and Germans, with a final emigrant – Sebald’s narrator himself – as the one who hears and transcribes the stories of others, either from notebooks or diaries or from conversations. One thing that Sebald does well is emphasise the subjectivity of experience. This was perhaps a necessity in Postwar German literature – after all, how could one possibly write objectively about the Holocaust? The Holocaust isn’t even mentioned in The Emigrants, but all but one of the emigrants are Jews, at least in part, and in the suicides and despairs that fill the book’s pages the Holocaust is always present in the background. The Emigrants is less the record of the lives of four emigrants so much as the record of trying to record the lives of four emigrants.

James Wood, the critic, writes of Sebald’s great skill at conveying “whole lives”. Rather than the false omniscience of the third person, or the boundedness of the first, Sebald’s approach is a hybrid form that lets us see from the outside the course of a life – from youth to death – as other people perceive it, even as we understand that those same people are flawed and limited in their perceptions, and never able to see the whole picture. But what we hear in these stories is not to be completely trusted not only because people can never know everything, but also because people will know things and conceal them. We arrive too late to hear the full picture, but we can try to build it out of the fragments the narrator picks up from others. The emigrants have all left their country, and one obvious question that we can never fully answer, is why?

Looking at the first two stories, which were probably my favourites, will make it clearer how Sebald operates in The Emigrants.

Dr Selwyn

Sebald’s narrator meets Dr Selwyn while looking for a place to rent. He lets Sebald and his wife rent part of his house in the English countryside and he reveals the story of his life to them over time. Selwyn is an old man, almost eighty, with a wife of his own, though she is rarely in the house. The house and grounds themselves are all in a state of decay. Selwyn’s great passion, tennis, is one he no longer indulges in. He has a servant who is mentally ill, and apparently no friends at all. But one day a guest does arrive, and the two men invite Sebald and his wife to dinner.

Selwyn describes how in his youth he felt a certain attraction for a mountaineering guide, Johannes Naegeli – “never in his life, neither before not later, did he feel as good as he did then, in the company of that man”. These are the words Sebald’s narrator gives to us, and they are not exactly definite in their meaning. Naegeli, we then learn, died in a mountaineering accident. A short while later Selwyn breaks off his narrative, saying it was probably not interesting. He starts showing slides from a trip he undertook with his guest ten years ago, and Sebald watches them, aware that they are sharing memories, but he remains on the outside.

At another time, Selwyn mentions being afflicted by homesickness more and more. He explains that his family originally came from near Grodno in the Russian Empire. We don’t learn why his family left, though the implication – and it is only an implication – is that antisemitism drove them out. Selwyn explains how he told his wife “the secret of my origins”, and perhaps that is to blame for the decline of their relationship – Selwyn’s name is an anglicised version of his original Seweryn. He also mentions perhaps having sold, “at one point, my soul.” A page later and Selwyn has shot himself.

At the end of each of the stories in The Emigrants I found it was useful to ask myself what the story was trying to say. With “Dr Selwyn” I ended up coming to the conclusion that what it was trying to say was precisely that it is impossible to say everything, and often impossible even to say enough. Like a shattered vase we only have the pieces of Selwyn’s dialogue with which to try to make sense of the shape of his life – his emigration, his possibly homosexual love, his cold marriage, his homesickness and death. We can perhaps put them all together, but the glue can only ever be our imaginations, and as a result, unreliable. In the face of the horror of suicide, we have nothing concrete to offer. We simply don’t know enough.

Paul Bereyter

Dr Selwyn was alive to tell his story, but Paul Bereyter is not so lucky. Instead, Sebald’s narrator learns of his old schoolteacher’s death through the papers: “Grief at the Loss of a Popular Teacher”. But immediately the narrator informs us that the article is, if not full of lies, at least dishonest. It does not say that Bereyter had killed himself as well, by laying himself down on the tracks before an oncoming train, or that Bereyter had been prevented during the Third Reich from teaching because he was a quarter Jewish. Newspapers, though we often hope to rely on them for facts, are just as unreliable as everything else in Sebald’s world when it comes to trying to piece together something approaching truth out of all its many fragments.

Sebald’s narrator’s attempt to recover Bereyter is not easy. Much has been destroyed. Architecture, which in Austerlitz is a way holding on to memory, here does the opposite – Bereyter’s house has been taken down and replaced by a block of flats. In S, the village where Bereyter had taught, people after the war either kept quiet about their role in the gradual removal of Jewish, even slightly Jewish, people from public life, or even forgot it altogether – and we cannot know which. Instead, for the narrator, growing up in the postwar years, Bereyter has a reputation that obscures all that. He has perhaps not grown up properly, he is a bit strange, a bit of a free-thinker. A kind of collective refusal to accept responsibility for Bereyter’s dismissal from his post hangs over the town.

Of course, Bereyter gets his job back and teaches and eventually finds what appears to be companionship in life. His suicide, then, is more complicated than simply his temporary loss of work. The words of the woman he spent much of his later years with describes the way he began an attempt to recover a sense of the lost past, of the suffering of the Jews. He reads authors who suffered as a result of the Nazi era, or those who flirted with suicide – Wittgenstein, Trakl, Mann, Benjamin. The woman seems to suggest that the result of this reading, this research, was that Bereyter no longer felt he could belong in the village where he had once taught. The weight of the guilt that he had revealed to himself was too much. And that, perhaps, is why he ended his life.

The other two stories contain many of the same themes and ideas of the first two, expanding on them, and approaching them from different angles. One thing that is particularly interesting is to consider the role of Sebald’s narrator in The Emigrants. We read about those whose obsession with the past and regrets eventually destroyed them. But our narrator too, is scouring the past, reconstructing lives. Where does all this place him? He too is a figure, trying to master a history that is too broad and too horrific for the human heart to bear. The question is, as always, why he does this. There is a moral value in trying to recover the past, but The Emigrants is not wholeheartedly in favour of archive-scouring either. It seems to suggest an approach to the past that acknowledges its own limitations: we cannot know everything, but we must know enough.

Style

The greatest influence on Sebald’s prose was probably the German writer, Adalbert Stifter, who is not read much in English these days. (Though NYRB released a new translation of Motley Stones just last week!). Stifter’s stories are slow, meandering, and don’t appear to be going anywhere. But at the same time, from the few I’ve read, there’s a certain magic in them all the same. Because they are so obviously stories, it is hard to feel pressure to get to the point. We wouldn’t hurry up someone telling a story by the fire – it’s the same feeling. The stories of The Emigrants, whatever their moral heftiness, are also broken up by long stretches of… nothing. Nature descriptions, pointless events, whatever.

“At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live.” Thus begins “Dr Selwyn”, not with a bang, but with a drive. This style is so unusual because we are everywhere taught to focus, to not waste time. Even in our reading, we want to be entertained. But I don’t think Sebald’s style here is merely the result of a desire to try my patience, though it does that. I think there is a kind of moral purpose here. Sebald is determined to notice things, to make a record, and this demands attention to the world around us. I also think that the style further adds to the contingency of the stories – Sebald’s narrator comes across them or their authors by chance. Things are found and saved from forgetting only by luck.

It’s worth mentioning the Sebald also uses black and white photographs in his works, another innovation. They generally depict things from the text, or at least seem to. Their low quality, and dubious authenticity, reflects back on the narrative. We often take the accuracy of a photo for granted, even though in reality they are just as unreliable a record as prose. Sebald’s use of photos at first suggests an additional investment in making his stories seem real, but in the end they only further contribute to the destruction of certainty, of wholeness, that takes place in whatever he writes.

Conclusion

In a way, I am not sure how to approach Sebald here. His fiction is unique among authors I’ve read. His stories juxtapose the quiet peace of nature and travel writing against the horrors of the earth, whether Holocaust of repression or whatever else. And yet at the same time, I have a lot of sympathy for the poet Michael Hofmann, who accused Sebald of “nailing literature on to a home-made fog – or perhaps a nineteenth-century ready-made fog.” Hofmann’s description is apt. Sebald’s writing takes us into a fog, into a world of uncertainty and confusion. Like your blogger, Sebald cannot write a simple sentence. And if everything on the earth circles around scepticism about being able to know anything, because our memories and perceptions are hopelessly corrupt, what are we supposed to take away from this?

There are some fantastic descriptions, and I think that Sebald’s topics are valuable. This is not so much Germans berating themselves over their guilt, as one German looking at the way lives can be maimed by trauma. The despair of The Emigrants is unavoidable. But when one’s dealing with that part of the 20th century, I don’t know what else one has any right to say.

For more sad Germans, check out Adorno and Grass.

Thinking Too Much: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, whose heyday in the English language was in the 19th century, thanks to the efforts of men and women like George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle, is a writer whose greatness we hear about more often than we actually sit down and read him. He was an indisputably superhuman being: writer of plays, poetry, prose, a statesman, a scientist, a man who saw battle in the Napoleonic Wars – Goethe seemed to have the experience and the talents and the range of a hundred others. He even, unlike his contemporaries, Schiller and Hölderlin, managed to live the entirety of his life without dying prematurely or going mad – no small feat for someone whose dates might make us term him “Romantic”. But still, we don’t read him. We know his main works – Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and of course Werther, and perhaps a smattering of his poetry – but only second-hand.

I don’t know why that is. The common explanation is that Goethe ultimately came to embody a distant, lofty, Enlightenment-era sensibility that makes him boring to the modern reader, growing up in the shadow of emotional, irrational, Romanticism. Perhaps there are simply a dearth of good translations? In my time at Cambridge I have read precisely two works by Goethe – Urfaust, an early version of Faust: Part 1, and Iphigenia, a play. Yet for the German tradition he is as central as Shakespeare is in our own. And so I went and bought myself a 14-volume collected edition of his works, and hope to read at least some of them, over the coming year(s). Being interested in canonical European literature and not knowing Goethe is rather embarrassing, after all. And if he is really a genius, I am sure he will have something interesting to say to me.

It’s just a shame he doesn’t in Werther!

The Sorrows of Young Werther

With the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther Goethe became an international sensation. But often what is initially popular doesn’t stand the test of time. Werther is perhaps more notorious now than anything else, on account of the various copycat suicides it inspired. I have to say, for me, a 21st century sad person, I find it strange how this book could have brought anyone to end their life. The gulf of sensibilities seems huge here. This story is not a semi-respectable literary love-triangle so much as one idiot’s selfish, solipsistic, obsession for another human being which brings torment to her and destruction to him. But, as always with German, it could just be that my understanding of the text was negatively impacted by my knowledge of the language. Anyway, Werther is important, so I suppose I must try to find what’s good and interesting in it. Let’s see.

Werther

Werther is structured predominantly as a series of letters from young Werther to his friend Wilhelm. Later on, the novel also includes a few letters to Lotte (the heroine), some of Werther’s translation work, and some third person narration. All of these formal elements are perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel, and I’ll write about them towards the end of this post.

The initial impression Werther’s letters make is that of an overwhelming emotional consciousness. Werther is emotional about absolutely everything. Even a decision like trying to live in the present is fraught with feelings: “I want to enjoy the present, and what has past should stay there in the past”. One of the central ideas of Werther is stated early on in a lamentation from Werther – “oh best of friends, what is the human heart!” The answer to the question, at least the one the book offers, is profoundly limited – we can’t really know the human heart. Werther’s letters, emotional, increasingly deranged, are only ever his letters. We are drawn into a world of pure subjectivity, so that it’s impossible to have any confidence about what is actually going on outside Werther’s head.

But we should have a go. Werther has ended up in a small village, there to do absolutely nothing. I believe the reason for his exile involves a romantic entanglement with Wilhelm’s sister, but I can’t be sure because the whole thing takes up a single page and is promptly forgotten. Here, in the peace and quiet, he makes friends with the locals, and eventually comes across a young lady, Charlotte – or Lotte, to her intimates. Lotte is, in Werther’s eyes, so absolutely amazing that to call her an angel is not enough. She is perfect, not just in her beauty, but in embodying a kind of idealised feminine existence: her mother is dead, so she looks after her younger siblings in her place. How amazing, how wonderful! Did I mention that she is engaged? Well… yes… but “I received the news somewhat indifferently”. Lotte reads, Lotte is natural and “artless”, a pure being plucked from Rousseau dreams.

Lotte

Yes, Werther is head-over-heels in love. What passion! But is it really passion, given that “often I didn’t even hear the words she spoke to me”. Werther’s imagination is so great, so hard-working, that it envelopes poor Lotte. They do have their moments, like when they are heading home after a storm and it’s all very spooky and intense. Memorably, she utters the name “Klopstock”, a well-known German poet of the day, while looking at the sky. Wilhelm, wisely, picks up on what Werther himself doesn’t, and suggests he leave before it’s too late. Werther, of course, does not. And at this point we have the first of his letters to Lotte: ridiculous, emotional, and dangerous too. Her husband-to-be has been away so far, but what will come of it when he returns?

“Wilhelm, is it just a phantom speaking, when we think all’s well?” Werther switches with alarming regularity from the deepest of joys to the deepest of sadnesses. “We long, ah, long to give our entire being over to something, and be filled with the bliss of a single, great, and powerful feeling”. He is an artist, who naturally barely gets anything done. He manages three incomplete portraits of Lotte. At one point he blames the peace and quiet of the rural idyll for his failure to work, but once he has tempestuous feelings he doesn’t become that much more successful either.

We hear Lotte rarely, at least while the narrative still consists of Werther’s letters. The effect of this is suffocating. We struggle to see her beneath Werther’s description of her, which is always filled with the possibility that he is deceiving himself (“Yes, I feel, and in this I am sure I can trust my heart… that she loves me!”).

Albert

In the first edition of Werther, published in 1774, Lotte’s fiancé Albert is a less sympathetic character than he appears in the revised version of Werther from 1787 which most people read these days. The thirteen years clearly gave Goethe time to mellow and let him turn upon his hero more than his youth once allowed. Albert is in many ways Werther’s opposite. Where Werther is emotional and prone to extremes, Albert is dour and serious and practical. Unlike Werther, who doesn’t appear to do any work at all, Albert’s main characteristic is his “Emsigkeit”, or industriousness. When the topic of passion comes up, Albert’s views are predictably sensible: “a man who lets his passions throw him about loses all his self-control and appears as a drunk or else as a madman”. For Werther, the Romantic, this is sacrilege. But Werther loves Lotte, so he keeps visiting their house.

The thought has just come to me that Werther and Theodor Storm’s Immensee have a lot in common. Both feature a love triangle where the emotional man loses out to the industrious man in the pursuit of the somewhat emotional girl. But the key difference is that Reinhard, the hero of Immensee, fails to propose to Elisabeth on time because of his sensibilities (he wants the proposal to be something special), while Werther arrives too late to make a proposal at all. Immensee is the tragic story of how emotions and hesitancy spoil a beautiful romance; Werther is the story of how a refusal to think rationally lets Werther imagine into being a romance where he has no right to, leaving him a far less sympathetic protagonist.

In the comparison between Albert and Werther we have played out what is one of the fundamental dramas of the 19th century – namely that of feeling against reason. In an increasingly industrial, increasingly business-driven world, feeling becomes a liability while hard-work and cool intelligence assume a dominant position in bourgeois society. In Werther, Lotte may regret that she is not with Werther, but she does not leave Albert, and Werther takes his own life. His sensibility dies with him, while Albert and Lotte will no doubt have plenty of little industrious children of their own. But perhaps all this is eminently sensible – only through the marriage of reason with feeling can feeling hope to survive. Werther, who wouldn’t know reason if it hit him over the head, just isn’t right for this world.  

Style and Structure

Werther’s second half, which details Werther’s precipitous decline into the abyss, is more interesting than the first, which had ended with him at last managing to leave Lotte’s village and do something else for a month. It is here that Goethe starts playing around with form. As long as we inhabit Werther’s insane letters, we are forced to accept his worldview: “What else is human fate but to go beyond its bounds, to drink the cup right to the dregs?”

But at about three quarters of the way through the book the letters stop and we have a message from the publisher, which comes as something of a shock. After the closed world of Werther’s letters, suddenly we have a sense of objectivity. It gives the reader the necessary perspective to realise that Werther really is going mad, just in case they hadn’t realise this earlier. We continue reading letters from Werther, but now they are broken up with information about how they were received, or what Werther was doing. We hear Lotte’s voice, her fear that perhaps “it is only because you couldn’t possess me that your desire gained so much power over you.” What a sensible thought. It is too bad that Werther is unwilling to listen to her.

The third person narration naturally allows us to hear about Werther’s suicide, as being dead makes it hard to write a letter (though of course there are plenty of literary workarounds). I think that the main effect of this narrative rupture is to ironize what had otherwise been deadly serious – Werther’s love. As the publisher goes through the letters left on Werther’s desk, including at least two letters that purport to be the last one’s he’ll ever send to Lotte, it’s hard not to feel that Werther is much less the emotional hero of the novel, and more a fool who came and destroyed the peace and happiness of others. His translation of part of the Ossian poems, by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, is beautiful, but at the same time hints at the unoriginality of his own feelings. Is Werther just imitating others, even at his most emotional?

Conclusion

I have written before about how writing a blog post makes me appreciate works of literature in ways I would not have otherwise and find enjoyment in works that otherwise frustrated me. But I am not sure that this is one of those times. Werther is too imbalanced – too much feeling, not enough reason. For the modern sensibility, Werther’s failings are too much his own. There are plenty of things to be sad about in life, in love as in everything else, without letting our imaginations create additional difficulties for us.

Werther was my first prose experience of the almighty Goethe, but it is a young man’s work, and I am glad I have finished it and can move on to something else. I am certain that better things await, if not in volume 6, then in one of the others! So, dear reader, know that the battle with Goethe has only just begun.

Readers, should you have read more Goethe to me and had a better experience, or indeed had a better experience with Werther, do let me know in the comments.

A Human Adultery Tale: Waves / Wellen by Eduard von Keyserling

Eduard von Keyserling is the latest German writer who publishers seem to have decided needs a revival. This is explained partly by his dates – he was born in 1855, and died in 1919 – which means there has been a flurry of attention upon him anyway thanks to the centenary of his death. My own edition of his late novels, which Waves / Wellen is included among, is a lovingly crafted hardback, filled with notes and the impressions of his contemporaries. The only problem is that it’s written in German. There are also new English translations of his works coming out all the time, Wikipedia suggests, including one of Waves itself which was released in 2019 and translated by Gary Miller.

Keyserling is interesting not only because he happened to die a hundred-ish years ago, though. He’s also the most well-known Baltic German writer. The Baltic Germans were the ethnically German ruling class who once inhabited Latvia and Estonia, a people who have now vanished for a variety of reasons. Keyserling is therefore interesting for representing a now vanished people, a now vanished way of life. But since every writer does that in some sense, we should perhaps look for reasons to read him elsewhere.

Waves, the short novel I finished yesterday, is a tender exploration of the life of a woman who has left her husband. It’s interesting to compare the life of Doralice, the heroine, with the heroines of the 19th century “adultery classics” – Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Effi Briest. While those novels showed adultery ending in unpleasant deaths, here Keyserling tries to ask what life is like instead.

A Woman’s Story

Theodor Fontane, my favourite German novelist of the 19th century, once remarked that women were far more interesting to write about than men. At least at that time, he was on to something. The realist tradition often takes as its spiritual core the battle between the individual and his or her society, and since women in that period saw their lives and freedoms more constrained by society than men did, their lives generally provided a more interesting canvas for writing on than did those of men. It’s just a shame that our occasionally well-intentioned 19th century male authors did not realise that the “interesting lives” of women did not necessarily have to be about adultery or marriage. I forgive them, sometimes, this.

Waves, or Wellen in the original, was published in 1911. Taking place on the Baltic coastline, it centres around two groups of people. The first is Doralice and her partner, Hans Grill. Doralice, who only a year before the story begins had been living as the Countess of Köhne-Jasky in a big castle, abandoned her much older husband to be with Hans, who she met while he was painting her portrait. The second group centres around the aristocratic and respectable Buttlär family – father, mother, the mother’s mother, and various children – most importantly, Lolo, whose fiancé Hilmar joins them a little into the story. These two groups, forced together by the small size of the beach setting, are what leads to the novel’s central conflict.

Eduard von Keyserling is often called an Expressionist. So is Edvard Munch, whose paintings match the slightly expressive mood of Waves.

Doralice, or Countess of Köhne-Jasky?

Doralice, or the Countess of Köhne-Jasky, is our main character. By the time the story begins she has already left her husband for Hans Grill, who is a humble painter. Together they are relaxing in on the coast, making use of her money. But Waves begins not with Doralice, but with Mrs General von Palikow and her daughter, Baroness Buttlär. We are introduced to Doralice through the rumours about her and the fear that she inspires in other characters. Baroness Buttlär is so terrified of the influence this free woman could have upon her children that she forces them to go to bed early so that they might not hear about her past. The adults of the family are “like two fortresses, keeping out all those who do not belong to their kind”. (all translations are mine)

Of course such attempts do not work, and the children are fascinated by the beautiful countess. Waves is a novel about misperceptions, as much as anything else, and for the children their misperception is that this woman is a Romantic heroine. Doralice is far less passionate and far more human than they make her out to be. Even her love for Hans is startlingly normal, which is the problem. At times we are left asking whether she left her husband because of how awful he was, or because of how nice Hans was. Doralice herself sits and dreams of her old life, with its luxury and respectability. In meeting the Buttlärs she is confronted with what she has lost forever.

A Woman’s Identity

What is sad is that all around Doralice are people who, if not bad, are still unwilling to let her develop in her own way. From the words she remembers from her parents – “”when you will be married”” – to her old husband’s habit of saying “we” when he really means “you”, and even to Hans Grill himself (though in a less oppressive form), Doralice’s identity is always being determined by those around her. When she finally has her “freedom”, it is unpleasant. Locked out of society, but still by birth an aristocrat, her days at the beach are marked by idleness and English novels.

This is in stark contrast to the fishermen of the village, who are always hard at work, and to Hans himself. Although it seems unfair, Hans is right when he says: “Work and action – this is what we need in our lives”. For idleness is fallow ground for the imagination, and imagination (especially when English novels are involved) can lead to tragedy.

An Adulteress

When Hilmar, the dashing Lieutenant who is Lola’s husband-to-be, turns up, things take a turn for the dangerous. Where the aristocrats think Doralice is someone to be feared, and the children admire her, Hilmar sees her as someone to seduce. And within the world he lives in, his view is logical. Here, an adulteress is a woman who has shown herself to be a loose woman with loose morals. Within German society at the time there was very little opportunity to say that actually, one can make a mistake in marriage, and that the second love may be more successful than the first. And so, even though he breaks his fiancée’s heart, Hilmar sets about seducing Doralice. He takes her out sailing, he finds her alone while she’s reading… you know, the usual.  

Their meeting while she is reading in the forest is one of the saddest moments in the story. For Doralice is lonely, desperately lonely in her new life. And yet Hilmar, a new face, can only see her as an object.

““I was once told by a young Attaché that he thought it was impolite for him to spend more than a moment alone with a young lady without declaring his love for her””.

Doralice’s words made me laugh, but they also contain a deep sense of the emptiness of even what first appears to be passionate feeling. She inhabits a world – all of the characters inhabit a world – where behaviour is almost completely conditioned by society, and true feelings are repressed so deeply that they may never come out again. Hilmar of course denies that he is here to declare his love. But Doralice knows better – she doesn’t want to play his game. “”All of my ties with the world have been cut. You can either talk about the weather with me, or you can declare your love for me instead.”” Everything is socially determined, and Doralice’s deep loneliness is the result.

More Munch. Both artists, Keyserling and Munch, have an excellent sense for the intensity of loneliness.

Conclusion: Waves, Loves, and Other Things

One of the aspects of Waves that I haven’t been able to talk about yet is the style. Although much of it is written in the same realist style of Fontane or Turgenev, when dealing with passionate emotions Keyserling is not afraid to go into long, intense and very expressive paragraphs. Waves as a title calls to mind Woolf’s The Waves, and the beach setting and style occasionally reminded me of To the Lighthouse. Like Woolf, Keyserling can write a beautiful, thoughtful description when he wants to. In this he is a transitional figure between the realisms of his youth and the modernisms that took over in his late middle age.

And I think that this is an important part of why this story is interesting in the first place, and why it’s worth reading if you can find a translation (or read German). Keyserling really gives Doralice a soul – he lets her feel. She is not as cunning as Emma Bovary, or as passionate as Anna Karenina. Instead, she is a human being who was forced into a marriage and life that were wrong, and who made the brave decision to walk away from it. Her story is the working out of a difficult relationship with the man she left her husband for, rather than one of passion and punishment. And after so many adultery tales, it’s nice to read one that sees the adulteress for what she really is – a human like the rest of us, instead of a lamb to be sacrificed to make a point about society.

That’s why Waves is worth your time. And did I mention it’s under two hundred pages?