Recommendations
Books Like Elective Affinities
Best books to read after Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Readers who love Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are drawn to its combination of the chemical metaphor as a way of investigating whether human beings can resist the affinities that disrupt their attachments, formal perfection, and the philosophical investigation of marriage and free will — they want novels that deal with the disruption of marriage by passion, the German classical tradition, and the question of whether human beings can resist the forces that govern them.
- 1Buy
Faust
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The companion masterwork. The companion investigation of the Goethean theme of human beings governed by forces they cannot fully control, and the question of whether resistance is possible
- 2Buy
The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The companion — Werther's fatal passion for Lotte. The companion investigation of the same Goethean theme: the encounter between a powerful passion and the social institutions that prevent its fulfillment, with fatal consequences
- 3Buy
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's companion investigation of the married woman who falls in love with someone else. The companion investigation of the same social and moral terrain: both organized around the encounter between a marriage and a passion the marriage cannot contain
- 4Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion investigation of marriage as a social institution and the possibilities of human connection. The companion investigation of what marriage is for and what happens when it fails to be what the parties hoped
- 5Buy
Effi Briest
by Theodor Fontane
Fontane's companion German novel about the young Effi and her affair. The companion in the German tradition: the consequences of the passion that violates the marriage contract in a society that punishes it
- 6Buy
The House in Paris
by Elizabeth Bowen
Bowen's companion twentieth-century investigation of the encounters that reorganize people into different configurations. The companion as the modernist version of the Elective Affinities theme: Bowen is one of the few novelists who has thought as deeply as Goethe about how human relationships are determined by forces not entirely under rational control
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's companion investigation of the chemistry of desire and the impossibility of repeating the past. The companion: like Ottilie for Eduard, Daisy for Gatsby is an object of desire that is also a symbol of a lost world that cannot be recovered
- 8Buy
The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's companion investigation of Isabel Archer's marriage and the forces that determine it. The companion investigation of the same question as Elective Affinities: can a free consciousness resist the affinities that would determine her choices? James's Isabel tries; Goethe's characters cannot
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