Ulrich Plenzdorf (1934–2007)

3.5*

Seventeen-year old Edgar Wibeau is a “straight A” student and an upcoming model citizen of the GDR. Until one day he does the unthinkable – he drops out of his apprenticeship, escapes from his sleepy home town, and settles down at his friend Willi’s abandoned summer house in East Berlin. Over the next few months he finds a handyman job, falls in love with a happily-engaged kindergarten teacher named Charlie and develops an unlikely fixation with Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. After Edgar dies in a cartoonish accident, his estranged father tries to piece together the final chapter of his son’s story by interviewing his friends and acquaintances. Transcripts of the interviews are found throughout the book (possibly an indication of the novel’s early life as a screenplay). They alternate with tragicomic “American Beauty” style monologues delivered by the dead Edgar himself.

The novel’s literary forebears are Salinger’s [b:The Catcher in the Rye|5107|The Catcher in the Rye|J.D. Salinger|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398034300s/5107.jpg|3036731] and Goethe’s [b:The Sorrows of Young Werther|16640|The Sorrows of Young Werther|Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386920896s/16640.jpg|746264]. Both are referenced in the book, with Goethe’s novel inspiring the title and playing a part in the plot. Indeed, The New Sorrows works best as a parody of Goethe, spiced with an element of political satire. The bucolic backdrop of the original Sorrows is replaced by a grey East Berlin, the OTT Romantic language substituted by Edgar’s “trendy” colloquialisms. It must have been particularly difficult to evoke the now dated 1970s German slang. In her 2015 translation for Pushkin Press, Romy Fursland opts for an argot which veers between the quaint and the cringe-inducing, but which is surprisingly effective.

This feels like a novel of its time – but nonetheless remains an enjoyable and often funny read.… (more)

3.5*

Seventeen-year old Edgar Wibeau is a “straight A” student and an upcoming model citizen of the GDR. Until one day he does the unthinkable – he drops out of his apprenticeship, escapes from his sleepy home town, and settles down at his friend Willi’s abandoned summer house in East Berlin. Over the next few months he finds a handyman job, falls in love with a happily-engaged kindergarten teacher named Charlie and develops an unlikely fixation with Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. After Edgar dies in a cartoonish accident, his estranged father tries to piece together the final chapter of his son’s story by interviewing his friends and acquaintances. Transcripts of the interviews are found throughout the book (possibly an indication of the novel’s early life as a screenplay). They alternate with tragicomic “American Beauty” style monologues delivered by the dead Edgar himself.

The novel’s literary forebears are Salinger’s [b:The Catcher in the Rye|5107|The Catcher in the Rye|J.D. Salinger|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1398034300s/5107.jpg|3036731] and Goethe’s [b:The Sorrows of Young Werther|16640|The Sorrows of Young Werther|Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386920896s/16640.jpg|746264]. Both are referenced in the book, with Goethe’s novel inspiring the title and playing a part in the plot. Indeed, The New Sorrows works best as a parody of Goethe, spiced with an element of political satire. The bucolic backdrop of the original Sorrows is replaced by a grey East Berlin, the OTT Romantic language substituted by Edgar’s “trendy” colloquialisms. It must have been particularly difficult to evoke the now dated 1970s German slang. In her 2015 translation for Pushkin Press, Romy Fursland opts for an argot which veers between the quaint and the cringe-inducing, but which is surprisingly effective.

This feels like a novel of its time – but nonetheless remains an enjoyable and often funny read.… (more)

In the 70s cult hit Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., the East German author Ulrich Plenzdorf cleverly wove together elements of the plots of Werther and Robinson Crusoe to create East Berlin's comic answer to The catcher in the rye. The 17-year-old engineering apprentice Edgar Wibeau drops out of his training in a boring provincial small town and runs away to Berlin where he hopes to become an undiscovered genius. Unfortunately, he has no talent for painting, and what's more, he finds that he has forgotten to bring any books. After a long search, all he can find are the remains of a Reclam paperback hanging on a nail in the privy. The title page has already been used, but the book turns out to be an epistolary novel about some guy called Werther. Not a patch on his old friend J.D. Salinger, but it will have to do, and after a while, despite coming to the conclusion that Werther is a blithering idiot, Edgar finds himself captivated by the story. And then the plot of Werther starts inveigling its way into his own life, but not quite in the way we are expecting it to.

Again, this is probably a book you would enjoy most if you read it when you're young, but it's still a lot of fun even later in life (part of the joke is that Edgar takes it for granted that Salinger is a teenager like himself , but we know that both Salinger and Plenzdorf are writing as grown-ups...). Reading both books back to back, I particularly enjoyed the way Edgar makes liberal (mis-)use of quotations from Goethe throughout the book, but no-one ever recognises them.… (more)