Volume 29, Number 15 · October 7, 1982
The Discreet Charm of Fontane
By Gabriele Annan
Theodor Fontane: Short Novels and Other Writings
edited by Peter Demetz, translated by E.M. Valk, by Ulf Zimmermann, by Krishna Winston
Continuum, 336 pp., $17.50; $8.95 (paper)
The heroine of A Man of Honor, a short novel of Theodor Fontane, is a girl toward whom 'it was impossible not to feel spontaneous warmth and friendliness.' The same is true of Fontane himself. He comes into the category—quite a small one—of instantly lovable writers, together with Montaigne, La Fontaine, Shakespeare, Turgenev, and Chekhov: not bad company to be in, though not many would claim that Fontane was as great an artist as the others. So why—outside Germany, and particularly North Germany—is he not more loved? Or, as Peter Gay asks in his foreword: 'Who reads the novels of Theodor Fontane today, in English?' Who, for that matter, ever read them in English?
Review, 3460 words
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