The New Sufferings of Young W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf
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Overview: One of the most talked-about works ever published in the German Democratic Republic! This innovative novel by an East German writer is a worthy companion to the classic it parodies and parallels: Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther. Goethe and J. D. Salinger were the two greatest influences on Edgar Wibeau, “Young W.” Edgar is a 17-year-old with the frustrations of teenagers all over the world, living with the added pressures of an East-bloc state. A model all-GDR boy, the son of a factory director, he suddenly drops out. But not from socialism per se–just from conformity, picky regulations, and official disapproval of jeans, the blues, and girls. Hiding out, he finds and devours an old copy of The Sufferings of Young Werther. From then on he wards off reality with Goethe texts, and young Wibeau’s fate is superimposed on that of Werther like a transparent overlay. It is an ironic and revealing linkage.
Narrated (for the most part) by Edgar Wibeau, the teen acknowledges only two favourite books — Robinson Crusoe and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye — but it is this “famous book” (whose title he never mentions) that is the guiding text — for both the novel and for Edgar’s life and fate.
Edgar shows little respect for the masterwork, describing coming across it for the first time in a dark outhouse, tearing off the (identifying) cover and title page of the well-known Reclam paperback, and then the last ones, to use as toilet paper. His first attempt at reading it leads him to chuck it across the room after two pages — but he picks it up again, and reads it straight through.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
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