Book Review: Goethe

John Armstrong's "Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet" is now available.

Goethe is more than just a 'Sturm und Drang' German writer. Much, much more.
His philosophical, cultural, political and literary insights are necessary information not only to higher academics and theorists but any reading-interested individual. He wrote well because he historicized and contextualized well.

Armstrong observes the following at the end of the book about his Goethe project:

"In working on this book I was surprised by how much I liked some of Goethe's works that I feared I would have to read merely from a sense of duty. In particular the plays Egmont and Tasso stuck me as really wonderful. I delayed reading Faust for as long as possible, finally getting round to it during a family winter holiday at a small coastal town..."

And reading Goethe is a life-changing experience. Whether it's the sufferings of Werther, or the torments of Faust and Gretchen, or Egmont's journey, Goethe can touch like very few can and have.

And John Armstrong seems to have done justice to his predilection for context.

Here's to Goethe.


graph per amazon

Norman Mailer Dies at 84

The American writer Norman Mailer died on the 10th of November and this is indeed a literary loss.
Mailer was nothing if not controversial, however the controversy he usually engendered was culturally and literarily relevant.

He married six times, refused not to comment on unpopular topics, and went after interesting political, social, and literary topics obssessively.

Many blogs were written about Mailer this past weekend and I was surprised to read some which depicted him as mediocre and irrelevant. He was anything but.

Today, however, I read a good tribute to him on the Huffington Post by Arianna Huffington.

Huffington, herself one with the literary bug and one who knew Mailer personally, wrote a respectful entry celebrating Mailer's idiosyncracies.

Huffington's winning sentence was: "Mailer was all about possibility -- about asking why things are the way they are and showing, through his writing, there are other ways they could be."

I felt compelled to comment on her piece as well and I just posted the following:

"If we don't take a minute to positively review the life of one who so frequently provided us with text, then we're not being respectful of his literary contribution to us. If nothing else, Mailer was indeed relevant and dialog-inviting and that, especally at the end of one's life, should beg for positive attention.
He was after all, a great American text himself."


graph per huffington post