The Sorrows of Young Werther

I thought I had logged all my books this year, but I read this one in January and forgot to log it. I listened to the Librivox recording. Melodramatic!

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

James Mustich

Every young person who’s written despairing romantic poems or a melodramatic diary, or even wallowed in the sadness of songs of unrequited love, has an ancestor in Werther, Goethe’s first consequential literary creation. The book in which he appears is for the most part an epistolary novel, consisting of letters from the lovesick title character to a friend who never appears. As a result, reading it is a kind of eavesdropping, as Werther shares his activities, conversations, and reflections with an intimacy of tone and an effusion of feeling that are peculiarly engaging despite the extent of his self-absorption. Traveling from the city to a small town to take care of a family inheritance, Werther grows to like the simplicity and quaintness of country life. But he falls madly in love with a local girl, Charlotte, who admires him but is already engaged. Both Charlotte and her fiancé (later husband) treat Werther with the greatest kindness, but Werther cannot contain his feelings, and spirals into suicidal depression. The end isn’t pretty. Although Goethe’s later work—the novel Elective Affinities, the poetry, and especially Faust—may be more elegant, Werther retains across the centuries all the passion and sentiment that made it so explosive in the Age of Enlightenment.