On Tangled Paths

A moving love story and a vivid depiction of Berlin in the 1870s, from Germany's greatest nineteenth-century novelist Theodor Fontane. 
 
Lene is a beautiful, orphaned young seamstress, and Botho is a handsome, aristocratic cavalry officer. They are in love, yet know they have only a short time together as society deems their relationship impossible and refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of their feelings. But while Botho appears to have a glittering life ahead of him, the love he feels may yet be his undoing. Published in 1887, On Tangled Paths caused a scandal on publication with its portrayal of a sexual affair across the classes, and is a taut, flawless masterpiece. 
 
Theodor Fontane was born in the Prussian province of Brandenburg in 1819. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he made his living as a writer. From 1855 to 1859, he lived in London and worked as a freelance journalist and press agent for the Prussian embassy. While working as a war correspondent during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1 he was taken prisoner, but released after two months. His first novel, Before the Storm, was published when he was fifty-eight and was followed by sixteen further novels, of which Effi Briest, No Way Back and On Tangled Paths are all published in Penguin Classics. He died in 1898. 
 
Peter James Bowman completed a PhD on Fontane at Cambridge University, and now works as a writer and translator. 
 
'On Tangled Paths has the flawless logic and beautiful design of the novella at its best' - Paul Binding, The Spectator 
 
'There is an undertow of sadness to this novel, yet to read it is a joy, for its humanity, subtlety and visual immediacy' - Ruth Pavey, The Independent 
 
'Theodor Fontane's first true masterpiece; it has a perfect beginning, a perfect ending, and no superfluous sentence in between' - Henry Garland

On Tangled Paths has the flawless logic and beautiful design of the novella at its best

There is an undertow of sadness to this novel, yet to read it is a joy, for its humanity, subtlety and visual immediacy

Theodor Fontane's first true masterpiece; it has a perfect beginning, a perfect ending, and no superfluous sentence in between

A tender and wistful love story... [Peter James Bowman's] translation is excellent

Theodor Fontane was born in the Prussian province of Brandenburg in 1819. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he made his living as a writer. From 1855 to 1859, he lived in London and worked as a freelance journalist and press agent for the Prussian embassy. While working as a war correspondent during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1 he was taken prisoner, but released after two months. His first novel, Before the Storm, was published when he was fifty-eight and was followed by sixteen further novels, of which Effi Briest, No Way Back and On Tangled Paths are all published in Penguin Classics. He died in 1898. 
 
Peter James Bowman completed a PhD on Fontane at Cambridge University, and now works as a writer and translator. His biography of Hermann von Puckler-Muskau, The Fortune Hunter: A German Prince in Regency England was published in 2010.

Lene is a beautiful, orphaned young seamstress, and Botho is a handsome, aristocratic cavalry officer. They are in love, yet know they have only a short time together as society deems their relationship impossible and refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of their feelings. But while Botho appears to have a glittering life ahead of him, the love he feels may yet be his undoing. Published in 1887, On Tangled Paths caused a scandal on publication with its portrayal of a sexual affair across the classes, and is a taut, flawless masterpiece.

Effi Briest

Theodor Fontane (1819-98) was a German novelist and potitical reporter. Along with EFFI BRIEST, Fontane is remembered for FRAU JENNY TREIBEL (1892), an ironic criticism of middle-class hypocrisy and small-mindedness. 
Hugh Rorrison has published extensively on modern German theatre and teaches German film at the University of Leeds. Helen Chambers organised the first conference on English translations of Fontane in 1992 and teaches German at the University of St Andrews.

Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfort and distraction in a brief liaison with Major Crampas, a married man with a dangerous reputation. But years later, when Effi has almost forgotten her affair, the secret returns to haunt her, with fatal consequences. Considered to be Fontane's greatest novel, Effi Briest is a humane, unsentimental portrait of a young woman torn between her duties as a wife and mother and the instincts of her heart.

Theodor Fontane

Hugh Rorrison

Helen Chambers

Charming, cheerful Count Holk is delighted to be called away from his solemn wife to the distant court of a Danish princess. Swept up in the romance of his new, lively surroundings at a 'castle by the sea', the Count does not realize that not everyone there is what they seem - and that a wrong decision may have fatal consequences. Published in 1892, this tragicomic work of failing marriage and modern sexual politics is full of the irony, elegance and masterful dialogue for which Theodor Fontane is acclaimed.

Theodor Fontane

No Way Back

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