Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Edward, one of the main characters, is voiced as a total ass which, in fairness, he is, but is maybe not as much of one as the narrator makes him. Really don't understand the weird British accent choices in this German book. I had it turned up to maximum to hear it and then switch to another normal volume audio book and nearly blow my eardrums out. The quality of the recording is extra quiet. Real human emotion is talked about, but never shown to us in any of these characters. The characters all live a privileged life and seem to remain untouched by life's difficulties even when the difficulties are quite severe. But even if it was a more modern translation, the story is still about cardboard cutouts that stand in for people. And in the public domain so available free of royalties. I think the first ever English translation of this novel so it is a very old fashioned read. Weird performance, terrible novel, poor quality Many thanks for creating an audio representation for Goethe beyond Werther and Faust! Please do Wilhelm Meister, the conversations with Eckerman, or even metamorphosis of plants, and I will eagerly purchase immediately! It definitely bolstered rather than subtracted from the presentation of this already outstanding novel. At first I cringed to hear the Edward accent, but by the end I was converted. But with this expert presentation of a slightly obscure Goethe has swayed my opinion: I can now decidedly stomach character accents if they are tactful and tasteful while remaining distinctly discernible, and also coherently maintained throughout the text, which is very much the case with Brant's performance here. Sometimes such flat readings can make denser and older texts a little tougher to discern, but I've always 'read' audiobooks as a means to crush more text than I could ever find time for irl, not for casual dramatic entertainment I want to to have my own reactions evinced by the text, not by the reading of the text. I have long been a firm adherent to the rule that audiobooks should strictly remain as verbal representations of a text, rather than interpretive performances, by which I mean to imply- no dramatic character accents please just read the text, with at most a mild emotive injection where the printed punctuation calls for it.

Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe