|
Dieter Wellershoff
Der Liebeswunsch
(The Lust for Love)
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, August 2000, 395 pp. Admirers of Goethe's brilliant short novel, Elective Affinities, will be inspired by this latter-day tale of two couples, which contains many echoes of it. Leonhard is a judge, ambitious, successful but starchy and middle-aged. Marlene and Paul, both doctors, are his close friends. When twenty-nine year-old Anja irrupts into their lives and Leonhard proposes to her, all at first seems well. Marlene and Paul have their guilt feelings assuaged - she because she had once had an affair with Leonhard but had ditched him in favour of Paul, Paul because he had left his wife and children to marry Marlene. It seems, however, that Anja, vulnerable and insecure, may be looking for a father-figure. Her sexual relations with Leonhard are not a success, she begins to drink heavily, becomes moody and depressed, and matters become worse when their only son, Daniel, has a serious accident for which her carelessness is to blame. Out of sexual desperation she starts an affair with Paul, and when this is discovered their respective partners both insist on splitting up. Paul embarks on a series of affairs with nurses at the hospital, Anja begins a descent into alcoholism and degradation and finally commits suicide. Marlene begins a new life and Leonhard returns to his former bachelor existence, while Anja's mother moves in to look after Daniel.
Failure to communicate is a major theme of this novel, pointed up by its careful, complicated structuring. The messages the characters leave for one another are misleading or misinterpreted, or there is a crucial delay in their being delivered. Anja resorts to communicating with Paul by the obsessive writing of letters, which she destroys before they can be read. This book is at once a stark parable about the destructive effects of passion, a telling critique of modern, affluent marriage, an object lesson in how pillars of society - in this case a doctor and a judge - can fail in their understanding of a vulnerable person's needs - and a highly readable story.
|
