Published in 1774, [The Sorrows of Young Werther] is a time-tested story: Boy meets girl – girl is otherwise engaged – boy becomes depressed and kills himself. Like [Catcher in the rye] and other stories that mysteriously tap into the veins of anxiety and pain in readers, [Werther] set off a fever after it was published and translated in other countries. Copy-cat suicides haunted the book and it was eventually banned in many places so that it wouldn’t cause any further death.

If only books caused things, imagine the world we could live in. What would books like [East of Eden] or [Of Human Bondage] or [The Color Purple] cause in the real world, if they had the power? No, books don’t cause things, just like music doesn’t cause people to act a c[Of Human Bondage] or [The Color Purple] cause in the real world, if they had the power? No, books don’t cause things, just like music doesn’t cause people to act a certain way – it is only in the negative that such a claim is made. Books like [Werther] are a window into the human condition, and sometimes so much so, that they help bridge the gap from thought to action for people who are otherwise already inclined to something. Goethe commented on the phenomenon himself in a conversation about the book, “The much talked about ‘age of [Werther] is not, strictly speaking, a mere historical event. It belongs to the life of every individual who must accommodate himself and his innate and instinctive freedom to the irksome restrictions of an obsolescent world. Happiness unattained, ambition unfulfilled, desires unsatisfied are the defects not of any particular age, but of every individual human being. It would be a pite indeed if everyone had not once in his life known a period when it seemed to him as if [Werther] had not been written especially for him.”

The epistolary novel is told in excerpted letters sent from Werther to a friend while he is in the country practicing his art. Initially, Werther is charmed by the countryside and the people he encounters there, if a little proud and disdainful. As the letters continue, Werther meets and falls in love with Charlotte. It is during this correspondence that the story becomes a deep examination of obsession and psychological decompensation. As Werther’s crisis deepens, the story transitions to accounts from witnesses of his final days and a suicide note that he pens. Only during the reading of Werther’s translation of some of the songs of Ossian does the novel drag, and I suspect because Ossian had a more dramatic effect on readers in 1774.

Bottom Line: Psychological examination of a man in crisis and on the brink of suicide.

4 bones!!!!! ( )