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A review by screen_memory
Goethe, Volume 9: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
4.0
Apprenticeship was not quite as good as I was hoping, but thank God it was not an epistolary novel.
As the so-called founding text of the Bildungsroman, the book (the first in a series if you don't count the abandoned and long-lost manuscript for Theatrical Calling, much of which was incorporated into Apprenticeship, as its own volume) deals with Wilhelm Meister's self-realization not only in his apprenticeship in the theater, but in varying aspects of the human experience.
It was not a bad book. It was good enough, but (keep in mind I'm no translation nerd) I could not help but feel that the translation was a bit simplified and reductive (to say nothing of the countless comma splices). My ugly edition was published as an entry for some old book club, and part of me wonders if priority was given more to the presentation (despite the ugliness of the chambray cloth in which the book is bound) over the translation.
Also, I cruised through this especially fast as I was eager to start Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Invisible Allies in preparation to then read his Gulag Archipelago. This might be one constituent aspect of my relative disinterest in the book, although it might be more owing to the fact that Germany's Goethe, in my opinion - and perhaps it's unfair to arbitrarily pit two national treasures against one another for no reason, but I can't shake the association - is outmatched by Balzac at least in their capability to write a compelling story.
As the so-called founding text of the Bildungsroman, the book (the first in a series if you don't count the abandoned and long-lost manuscript for Theatrical Calling, much of which was incorporated into Apprenticeship, as its own volume) deals with Wilhelm Meister's self-realization not only in his apprenticeship in the theater, but in varying aspects of the human experience.
It was not a bad book. It was good enough, but (keep in mind I'm no translation nerd) I could not help but feel that the translation was a bit simplified and reductive (to say nothing of the countless comma splices). My ugly edition was published as an entry for some old book club, and part of me wonders if priority was given more to the presentation (despite the ugliness of the chambray cloth in which the book is bound) over the translation.
Also, I cruised through this especially fast as I was eager to start Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Invisible Allies in preparation to then read his Gulag Archipelago. This might be one constituent aspect of my relative disinterest in the book, although it might be more owing to the fact that Germany's Goethe, in my opinion - and perhaps it's unfair to arbitrarily pit two national treasures against one another for no reason, but I can't shake the association - is outmatched by Balzac at least in their capability to write a compelling story.