Just finished Fontane's Effi Briest. Found reading it fairly rewarding, but hard work. In many ways a subtle novel, but slow-moving for three-quarters of its length. Then it picks up towards the end, with the revelation of Effi's infidelity and I wondered if Fontane was going to do something a bit special in the last two chapters, only for him to fall back into tiresome illness as metaphor - which Dickens and Flaubert, to mention two rivals, do with far greater verve.
The back cover of the Oxford World's Classics edition - which comes with an excellent introductory essay - compares the work to Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. Sadly that's way off the mark. It's strictly Division 3 in comparison to those way out in front of the Premier League.
No comments:
Post a Comment