Teaser Tuesdays – June 10, 2014

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other Teaser Tuesdays participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

 

My Teaser this week is from Elective Affinities (1809) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832). The quote is from the Penguin Classics edition, translation by R. J. Hollingdale.

 

 

‘Granted this fashion of argument,’ Eduard replied, ‘you women would be invincible: first sensible, so that one cannot contradict; affectionate, so that one is glad to give in; sensitive, so that one does not want to hurt you; full of premonitions, so that one is frightened.’

‘I am not superstitious,’ Charlotte replied, ‘and would pay no attention to these obscure stirrings if that was all they were; but mostly they are instinctive recollections of the happy or unhappy consequences of our own or other people’s past actions.’

 

Don’t be put off by the title as I was when I first saw it and thought the book might be philosophical essays or some other non-fiction. The cover blurb of the above edition reads: “Elective Affinities reflects the conflict which Goethe felt between his high regard for the idea of marriage and his experience of spontaneous passion. Set in the German countryside of the early nineteenth century, the novel depicts the emotional turmoil into which Eduard and Charlotte are thrown by the introduction into their comfortably idle lives of two fresh faces.”

 

Do you have a ‘Teaser’ to share with us?

Please leave a comment with the link on MizB’s Teaser Tuesday post or below. Or, if you don’t have a blog, you can share your Teaser here in the comment section instead.