Books
FERDINAND MOUNT
Goethe: His Faustian Life
By A N Wilson
Bloomsbury £25
It’s unmistakably a mission.
As he sets out on his entrancing journey, A N Wilson willingly concedes that ‘Goethe is, surely, among all the truly great writers of this world, the least read in the English-speaking world.’
What are we all missing, in particular, by not reading his acknowledged masterpiece, Faust? Wilson declares that ‘he is going to attempt the impossible – to read Faust and persuade you to do so too’.
It’s not as if the English are instinctively hostile to foreign literature. We lap up ; we descend eagerly into Dante’s Wilson has written brilliantly about both Tolstoy and Dante, learning Russian and Italian for the purpose, just as he has