Dwight Garner at the New York Times:
At what point does an aside become a tangent, a tangent a digression, a digression a meander, a meander a ramble, a ramble a circumlocution, a circumlocution an excursus and an excursus a cul-de-sac? The reader has time to consider such matters while reading A.N. Wilson’s elastic-waisted but hardly unintelligent new biography, “Goethe: His Faustian Life.”
Wilson is a prolific English biographer (of Darwin, Tolstoy, Milton and Queen Victoria, among others) and novelist whose books are usually worth attending to. Especially recommended is his bittersweet memoir “Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises,” from 2022. Two of his daughters, the classicist Emily Wilson and the food writer Bee Wilson, are inimitable writers as well. Does the world need another biography of the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the author of the novels “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and “Elective Affinities” as well as “Faust,” his masterpiece, a tragic play in two parts?
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.