Paula Munier

Paula Munier is a literary agent and the USA TODAY bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mysteries. A Borrowing of Bones, the first in the series, was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. The sequel Blind Search, inspired by the real-life rescue of a little boy with autism who got lost in the woods, was followed by The Hiding Place in 2021.

Munier's new Mercy Carr mystery is The Wedding Plot.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach

I read a lot of books on nature, and this one by the author the Washington Post calls “America’s funniest science writer” is as entertaining as it is enlightening. Roach takes us on a trip around the world, to the places where wildlife and humankind overlap—and not in a good way. You meet marauding elephants in India, “nuisance” bears in Aspen, ruinous gulls in Vatican City—and no matter what the offense, you find yourself rooting for the wildlife. At least I did.

The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths

Elly Griffiths aka Domenica De Rosa is one of my favorite authors. This latest volume in her Ruth Galloway series does not disappoint. One of the few novels set during the pandemic, The Locked Room captures what lockdown was like for many of us—only worse, thanks to murder and mayhem. I read it in one sitting, as I do most all of Griffiths’ work. And I’ll read it at least one more time, this time as a writer rather than reader, because our best writing teachers are our betters.

Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett

This is my new favorite book, and Annie Hartnett is my new favorite novelist. This wonderful story defies description, suffice it to say that it’s like Our Town meets Alice Hoffman, with a bit of John Irving thrown in for good measure.

Visit Paula Munier's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Paula Munier & Bear.

Q&A with Paula Munier.

My Book, The Movie: The Wedding Plot.

The Page 69 Test: The Wedding Plot.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Rooney

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017) and the novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (2020). Where Are the Snows, her latest poetry collection, was chosen by Kazim Ali as the winner of the X.J. Kennedy Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2022. Her latest novel, based on the life and work of the silent movie star Colleen Moore, will be published by in September of 2023.

Recently I asked Rooney about what she was reading. Her reply:

Earlier this year, I read (and reviewed) Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, a fantastic exploration of how honest, uninhibited laughter connects us to our truest selves.

In it, she mentions Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm, so I’ve gotten around to reading it myself and it’s great. Malcolm’s perceptive, deadpan, voracious critical intelligence makes it a thrill to see her analyses of everything from the cottage industry of writing that’s sprung up around Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s Bloomsbury to the poorly-aged 1909 sentimental children’s novel A Girl of the Limberlost.

The title essay alone—in which she really does present 41 possible beginnings of a feature on the postmodernist American painter and 1980s art world superstar David Salle, and which ultimately becomes the whole feature itself—is worth the price of admission. I mean, just look at this passage where she shows him some of her own collages:

Looking back on the incident, I see that Salle had also seen what any first-year student of psychology would have seen – that, for all my protests to the contrary, I had brought my art to him to be praised. Every amateur harbors the fantasy that his work is only waiting to be discovered and acclaimed; a second fantasy – that the established contemporary artists must (also) be frauds – is a necessary corollary.

Her assessments spare no one, including herself.

Visit Kathleen Rooney's website.

The Page 99 Test: Live Nude Girl.

The Page 99 Test: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

My Book, The Movie: For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs.

My Book, The Movie: Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.

The Page 69 Test: Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

My Book, The Movie: Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allie Reynolds

British-born Allie Reynolds is a former freestyle snowboarder who swapped her snowboard for a surfboard and moved to the Gold Coast in Australia, where she taught English as a foreign language for fifteen years. She still lives in Australia with her family. Reynolds’s short fiction has been published in women’s magazines in the UK, Australia, Sweden, and South Africa. Shiver is her debut novel.

The Swell is Reynolds's new novel.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I'm a massive reader. I'm not sure why, but what I most crave from fiction at the moment, is emotion. My favourite book last year was Beartown by Fredrik Backman. I was drawn to the book by the sports theme - the story centres around a small town in Sweden where everyone is obsessed with ice hockey - but I loved it for the emotions the author creates in the reader. One minute I was crying, the next minute I was bursting with pride for one of the characters. It takes such skill to create emotions so effortlessly. The prose is simple yet so powerful. The book is a translation from Swedish and I think the translator did an amazing job.

As I thriller writer, I read lots of thrillers. Some can feel a little cold and emotionless. I love when thriller authors capture emotion. I've just finished Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister, which is like no thriller I've ever read! It has a supernatural twist: a mother must go back in time to try to prevent her beloved teenage son from committing murder. The story starts with the murder and future chapters jump back in time to before it. There was so much emotion, warmth and humour in this story, which we rarely find in thrillers. There were some really touching scenes where the mother goes back in time to see her son at a younger age, which brought tears to my eyes and made me reflect on my own sons and the relationship I have with them. I love it when fiction makes me reflect on my life like that.

Where the Crawdads Sing was another book I loved recently. There is so much emotion in this story. I found it thought-provoking, heart-breaking and just beautiful. It made me cry a few times. I'm looking forward to watching the movie, and seeing if it makes me cry too!

Visit Allie Reynolds's website.

Q&A with Allie Reynolds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meghan Holloway

Meghan Holloway found her first Nancy Drew mystery in a sun-dappled attic at the age of eight and subsequently fell in love with the grip and tautness of a well-told mystery. She flew an airplane before she learned how to drive a car, did her undergrad work in Creative Writing in the sweltering south, and finished a Masters of Library and Information Science in the blustery north. She spent a summer and fall in Maine picking peaches and apples, traveled the world for a few years, and did a stint fighting crime in the records section of a police department. She now lives on the Atlantic coast with her standard poodle and spends her days as a scientist with the requisite glasses but minus the lab coat.

Holloway's new novel is Killing Field.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Holloway's reply:

My nightstand has held some great reads recently, and there are more in the queue. Here is what I have been reading in the last couple of weeks:

"Signal Moon," Kate Quinn

I am so intrigued by the short story format, and Kate Quinn delivers a gem with this one. The time slip element was fun, but the characters made the story. Quinn is one of my go-to authors for strong female historical figures. Learning about the Wrens and their role in WWII was a treat. Lots of suspense and heart packed into 50 pages.

Kismet, Amina Akhtar

Is there anything as satisfying as a darkly funny, twisted murder mystery? This is a pointed, unflinching take on racism, the social media culture, and the wellness industry. The backdrop of the Arizona desert is stunning, and my favorite characters may well be the ravens.

The Ghosts of Paris, Tara Moss

I love a resourceful, independent, clever woman, and Billie Walker, former war reporter turned sleuth, fits the bill. I felt transported to post-WWII Paris with the detailed descriptions. There is a wealth of history and pointed social commentary in this engrossing read as Billie and an outstanding cast of secondary characters unravel the mystery of two missing husbands.

The Woman in the Library, Sulari Gentill

The literary device of an embedded narrative fascinates me, and a murder in a library? Yes, please. This is an entertaining read, and the authors of both books in the story have their own mysteries to solve.

There are, of course, the other research books I am reading for my current work in progress. What is on your Kindle or nightstand? Send some recommendations my way.

Visit Meghan Holloway's website, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's recent novel is The Privilege, the ninth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. The tenth, Lunatic Carnival, will be published later this summer. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine:

Don Benedetto, a Catholic priest in a small Italian village, had “a liberty of spirit and a liveliness of mind that in his station in life were positively foolhardy.” His relatives hated him for “not having the prestige with the authorities that they expected of him and for having been reduced to living like a hermit instead of being able to use influence on their behalf at a time when honest work was of no use whatever in the absence of recommendations and backing in high places.” When his sister arranged a small celebration on his 75th birthday, only two of his former students bothered to attend, one of whom excuses his membership in the Fascist party on the ground that, “in school you dream, in life you have to adapt yourself.” To which Don Benedetto ironically replies, “What? Is that how an activist talks? A Nietzsche fan?”

Don Benedetto is not very interested in either of his guests; he is much more interested in someone who is not there, his favorite pupil, Pietro Spina, a boy who was not satisfied with what he found in textbooks. Don Benedetto still has the essay in which Spina had written, “But for the fact that it would be very boring to be exhibited on altars after one’s death, to be prayed to and worshipped by a lot of unknown people, mainly ugly old women, I should like to be a saint. I don’t want to live in accordance with circumstances, conventions and material expediency, but I want to live and struggle for what seems to be just and right without regard to the consequences.” It does not surprise Don Benedetto that Pietro Spina is a member of the Communist party.

But not a very good member. The party requires total commitment, unquestioning support for whatever the party majority decides, and Pietro objects to this. “I can’t sacrifice for the party’s sake the reasons for which I joined it.” Told that “Breaking with the party means abandoning the idea behind it,” Pietro insists this “would be like putting the Church before Christ.”

This is the key to understanding everything Ignazio Silone, who had himself once been a communist, is trying to say. The Church had promised heaven in life after death; Communism promised heaven on earth. The Church, as the source of revealed truth, spoke with only one voice; the Communist party, the source of the truth about history and what history would bring, had to do the same thing. The question posed by Pietro Spina became more pointed, and more tragic, when the Russian Communist party, under the control of Stalin, began the systematic elimination of the leaders of the Russian Revolution of l917, men like Bukharin and Trotsky, who believed that the Russian Revolution could not survive by itself and that it was impossible to have what Stalin called Socialism in One Country.

“How dare you describe our condemnation of Bukharin and other traitors as conformism. Are you mad?” asks one of Pietro Spina’s superiors. To which he replies: “How can we destroy fascist subservience if we abandon the critical spirit?”

Through Pietro Spina, Ignazio Silone raises questions men like Bukharin could not bring themselves to ask. Marxism had become their religion; the Communist party their Church. Failure to follow the orders of their Church meant questioning their religion, which would make a mockery of everything they had believed and everything they had done. Put on trial for betraying the party, accused of being an agent of foreign powers, Bukharin confessed to crimes he did not commit. It was the only way he had left to serve the cause to which he had dedicated his life, the only way he could still honor his belief that the Communist party was the chosen instrument of History. There was a reason that Arthur Koestler’s once famous novel about that trial was called Darkness at Noon.

Pietro Spina is less attached to the Communist party than he is opposed to the Fascist party that has taken control in Italy. Arrested at the beginning of l927 and deported to the island of Lipari, he escapes to France. He comes back, sick and dying, to the small village in Italy where he had been raised. In a subtle reminder of the parallels between the Church and the Party, Silone has the priest, Don Benedetto, disguise his former student, now wanted by the Fascist government, as a priest. His new name is Don Paolo.

His illness becomes the excuse why he cannot perform the duties of a priest and must recover in a place where he will not be required to do so. He goes to a village some miles away and takes rooms at an inn run by an older woman, Matalena, who is enormously proud that Don Paolo has chosen her place to stay. A girl, for whom Don Paolo had once done a kindness, thinks him not only a saint, but might be Jesus Christ himself. Matalena wonders whether, if he really is Jesus Christ, she should inform the carabinieri. As Silone points out, “a copy of the police regulations was displayed on the inn door, but the arrival of Jesus was not an eventuality foreseen in them.”

The village is filled with ignorance and superstition. A chapel is dedicated in memory of a miracle in days gone by. That year, someone explains to Don Paolo, roses bloomed, cherries ripened and ewes lambed in January. “Instead of rejoicing, people were terrified, of course. Were not such blessings the harbingers of disaster? Sure enough, cholera came that summer.” A little further down the same road, he is shown a cross inscribed with the date a notary, Don Giulio, was robbed and murdered. “Don Giulio lent out money at thirty percent. After his death usury disappeared.”

With the Fascists in power, the schoolmistress wears the emblem of the government party on her dress. One of the few literate people in the village, she reads every day in public from the official government newspaper from Rome. One day she reads that, “We have a leader from whom all the nations of the earth envy us. Who knows what they would be prepared to pay to have him in their country.” One of the villagers, an old man “who disliked generalities,” interrupts to ask how much. “What are they offering, and would it be a cash or a credit transaction.” He was serious.

The government has decided that the glory of Italy, destined to repeat the glory of the Roman Empire, requires the invasion of Abyssinia. All anyone can talk about in the village is the war in Africa, which will take only a few days because, “Our death ray will carbonize the enemy.” The government organizes a “spontaneous demonstration.” Everywhere, even in this small remote place, trucks are sent in all directions. “But the carabinieri must go with the trucks so that people will see the necessity of coming here of their own accord.” Everyone gathers in the village square. Two brass bands march through the streets. A radio set, “crowned by a trophy of flags,” is placed on a chair. “It was from there that the voice proclaiming war would emerge. As the poor people arrived they were herded beneath this small object on which their collective destiny depended.”

After the announcement, a local attorney gave an oration in which he remarked without conscious irony that, “Our country has grown greater after every war, and in particular after every defeat.”

Later that day, Don Paolo asks some of the locals, who have been drinking, if they understood “anything of what is going on?” “What a thing to ask,” replies one of them. “No one told us there was any need to understand.”

What Pietro Spina understands is that fascism, like communism and every other form of dictatorship, is based on unanimity. One man “who goes on thinking with his own brain is a threat to public order.” Nor is this true only of dictatorships. “You can live in the most democratic country in the world, and if you are lazy, callous, servile, you are not free, in spite of the absence of violence and coercion, you are a slave.”

Bread and Wine was first published in a German edition in 1936. An English version was published that same year in London. The original text was completely revised before it was published for the first time in Italy in 1955. No one knows how many revisions it went through. Ignazio Silone was what every writer, every serious writer, should be: someone who would, as he put it, gladly spend his life, “writing and rewriting the same book: the single book that every writer has within him that is the image of his soul and of which his published works are only more or less fragments.” It only follows that the thing that matters most “in a work of literature” is “the development of the interior life of the characters.” As Ignazio Silone was one of the last to understand, the life of literature is the life of the mind. Which is one of the reasons that each reading of Bread and Wine teaches something new.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Chitra Divakaruni is the author of 20 books, the latest being the award-winning historical novel, The Last Queen.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

Lonesome Flight by Dipak Gupta

This first novel depicts a powerful and tragic story known to too few. It is the story of the Naxalite terrorist movement in India in the 1960s that seduced and claimed many promising young lives. Set in Calcutta, the city I grew up in, Gupta’s novel resonated with me because of its authentic details and the writer’s keen eye. It is also a moving love story, and an adventure rife with secrets and betrayals, violence and redemption. I loved the way the novel surprised me as it moved from the bustle of the city to the lives of tribals in remote forests of Bengal.

Reading, I felt that this insightful fictional depiction of how bright young minds are recruited into becoming terrorists is particularly timely because of the distressing growth of terrorist cells worldwide today, as well as the resurgence of the Naxalite movement in India. It is a story for the world.

Researching a bit, I discovered that the novel was centered around an experience that Gupta himself lived through. The experience he fictionalizes left such a powerful mark on him that he decided to dedicate his life to the study of terrorism. He is now a distinguished professor emeritus of Sociology at San Diego State University.

Perhaps this is why Lonesome Flight has so many incidents of wrenching authenticity that add to its appeal.

Visit Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's website.

The Page 69 Test: Oleander Girl.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Queen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katie Tallo

Katie Tallo has been an award-winning screenwriter and director for more than two decades. In 2012, she was inspired to begin writing novels.

Dark August is her debut novel.

Tallo's new novel is Poison Lilies.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I just finished Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. The character is an emotionally fragile actress whose marriage and career have fallen apart. It’s moody and shocking and raw. It captures the 60s vibe really well yet feels so relevant and timeless. Emptiness and apathy exist in any era I suppose. I think I can learn a lot from Didion’s writing. She's fearless and witty and does it all with little flourish. Her prose is bare-bones yet cuts to the bone. I can’t believe this is the first book I’ve read of hers. It won’t be the last.

Visit Katie Tallo's website.

The Page 69 Test: Dark August.

Q&A with Katie Tallo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eva Gates

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than forty-five books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Catskill Summer Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane.

Delany is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. Delany is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Delany's newest book (as Eva Gates) is the Lighthouse Library mystery, Death By Beach Read.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Delany's reply:

I’ve recently been on a couple of ultra long flights. I love long flights: I find that these days its about the only time I can seriously get into a book without constant interruptions.

Here’s a glimpse at what I’ve been reading on all these flights.

Going to Beautiful by Anthony Bidulka. I picked this up because Tony’s a good friend of mine. He used to write a hilarious series of globetrotting PI novels that I loved, but he’s been quiet lately, in his writing life anyway. So I was excited to find something new and picked up Going to Beautiful. I enjoyed it very much. It’s a beautifully written, gentle, often hilarious, always poignant book about a grieving man finding community and acceptance in small town Saskatchewan, where he is most definitely a fish out of water. There is a mystery component, which is what brings the protagonist to the small town, but it is a minor part of the book. Highly recommended.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig. English writer Matt Haig is what I might call a ‘quirky’ writer. His plots are substantially out of the ordinary. This book is about a man who has a far longer life span than normal - he was born in the 16th century and is now only in middle-age. The book jumps around in time, but he is not a time-traveller. His life is as linear as the rest of us. The book’s light and funny and makes us think seriously about what we’d do with that sort of time, and if it would be worth it to live so much longer than everyone you’ve ever loved. The book is now in production as a movie with Benedict Cumberbatch and I can’t wait!

The Radleys by Matt Haig. Talk about quirky: The Radleys are vampires living in middle-class England and trying to appear as average as everyone else. I can’t say I liked it as much as How to Stop Time but the premise is interesting and it’s well done. The parents have concealed from their two children that they are vampires, but when the daughter declares that she’s going to be a vegan, they realize they have a problem. How would you like to be a bullied teenage boy, discovering that you’re a real vampire?

Woman on the Edge by Samantha Bailey. Domestic suspense is all the rage these days and, as is typical with books that are ‘in’, quality varies widely. At first glance this book seems to be one of a endless variations on a theme of an ordinary woman suddenly thrust into danger, with no idea what’s going on, but Bailey pulls it off with an intricate plot that is expertly done and plenty of suspense.

Follow Eva Gates on Twitter and visit Vicki Delany's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death By Beach Read.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Colt

Peter Colt was born in Boston, MA in 1973 and moved to Nantucket Island shortly thereafter. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. He is a police officer in a New England city and the married father of two boys.

Colt's new Andy Roark mystery is Death at Fort Devens.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Colt's reply:

Right now, I am reading a lot of different things at once. Right now, piled up on the bedside table there are a bunch of books about History/Military history. I tend to do a lot of research for my books and so there is a lot of stuff about Vietnam along the lines of John Stryker Meyer’s excellent Across the Fence, Lynne M. Black’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and Nick Brokhausen’s Whispers in the Tall Grass and We Few. All three authors were Army Special Forces soldiers in Vietnam, in the Studies and Observation Group (SOG). Their firsthand accounts of their very secret, very deadly war are riveting. There is nothing in fiction that compares to their real stories from Vietnam.

My protagonist, Andy Roark, as part of his backstory was in SOG. There are many SOG veterans who are still alive. It is challenging writing a character who comes from such an elite group. Their books, and others, are a huge help in trying to keep the character and his adventures realistic. I would hate for one of the surviving SOG soldiers to read my book and think: “Wow, he just got it all wrong.”

When I am not reading history or military history, I read a lot of cookbooks. Currently I am reading The Nero Wolfe Cookbook by Rex Stout. This is a fascinating collection of recipes from the Nero Wolfe books which proves to be a nice way of marrying my love of cooking and mysteries. Many of the recipes are obscure but well worth looking at. As an added bonus the cookbook itself is chock full of quotes from the series and it is an excellent companion to the novels. It is best not to read it while hungry.

Visit Peter Colt's website.

Q&A with Peter Colt.

The Page 69 Test: Death at Fort Devens.

My Book, The Movie: Death at Fort Devens.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's recent novel is The Privilege, the ninth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. The tenth, Lunatic Carnival, will be published later this summer. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther:

The Sorrows of Young Werther is a very short novel that tells the story of a very short life. Werther, a young man in his twenties, falls in love with Charlotte, a young woman who has, since her mother’s death, been a mother to her younger siblings. Unfortunately for Werther, and perhaps unfortunately for herself, Charlotte is engaged to Albert, a young man whom even Werther finds likable. In the vain hope that he can forget Charlotte and recover something of his sanity, Werther takes a position with an ambassador, but he is too much in love to stay away. He comes back and finds that Charlotte and Albert have married. Because the three of them are friends, Charlotte and Werther still see each other. Convinced that Charlotte really loves him, but also convinced that Charlotte will remain the wife of Albert, Werther shoots himself and dies.

That is it, the short story of Werther’s short life. There is nothing particularly interesting, much less fascinating, about a story like this, the predictable suicide of a lover whose love has been lost, which might make us wonder, or even suspect, that there is more to the story than the story itself. If we know nothing else about the author, we know that Goethe also wrote Faust. What we might not have known, even had we read Faust, is that it was written at the same time as he had written The Sorrows of Young Werther.

“Faust, sprang up at the same time as Werther,” he told his friend Eckermann. “I brought it with me in 1775 to Weimar; I had written it on letter paper; and had not made an erasure, for I took care not to write down a line that was not worthy to remain.”

Faust emerged at the same time as Werther, but it is Werther that “is a creation in which I, like a pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart. It contains so much from the innermost recesses of my heart that it might easily be spread into a novel of ten such volumes.” Goethe wrote Werther in l774. Fifty years later, when he made this remark, he admitted that he had read it since only once. “I dread lest I should once more experience the peculiar mental state from which it was produced.”

The feeling, that “peculiar mental state,” Goethe considered the cause of what he had written, had its parallel in the effect Werther had on those who read it, and nearly everyone did. Thomas Carlyle, who, in 1777, translated Werther into English, wrote that it “rose like a literary meteor, not only over Germany, but into the remotest corners of Europe,” that it “appeared to seize the hearts of men in all the quarters of the world and to utter for them the words which they had long been waiting to hear.” It called forth a “boundless delirium of extravagance.”

Was this because Goethe had the good fortune to create something that appealed to a feeling characteristic of the age? In one sense, he did; an appeal, if you will, to something that had been lost, something gone missing for two hundred years.

“And then how tame and weak has life itself become during the last two shabby centuries. Where do we now meet an original nature? where is the man with the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?”

This, it should be noted, from a man who, as he put it himself, had “the great advantage of being born at a time when the greatest events that agitated the world occurred, and such have continued to occur during my long life.” Events that included the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and Napoleon and his fall. And what was the advantage in this? - “I have attained results and insights impossible to those who are born now and must learn all these things from books they will not understand.”

That insight into things allowed Goethe to distinguish between what is ephemeral and what is essential, between what is characteristic of an age and what is found in every age. What some called the ‘Werther period,’ is no period at all. It belongs “to the career of every individual who, with an innate free instinct, must accommodate himself to the narrow limits of an antiquated world. Obstructed fortune, restrained activity, unfulfilled wishes, are calamities not of any particular time but of every individual man; and it would be bad indeed if everybody had not, once in his life, known a time when Werther seemed as if it had been written for him alone.”

Napoleon, among others, seemed to think Werther had been written for him. He carried it in his “field library” everywhere he went, and studied it the way “a criminal judge does his documents;” studied it so closely that when he met Goethe he could point out a passage he thought could not stand strict scrutiny, an observation with which Goethe agreed.

What is there about Werther, this short novel that tells the story of a very short life, that struck such a chord and kept someone like Napoleon reading it over and over again, this story that its author could not bear to read more than once because of the memories it brought back. Begin at the beginning all over again.

The story is told through a series of letters written by Werther to a very close friend. Each letter is given a date, the day and the month, but never the year. On May 17, Werther writes that the woman he loved, the “friend of my youth,” with whom he had been able “to display, to its full extent, that mysterious feeling with which my heart embraces nature,” has died. Nine days later, he has gone to the village of Walheim, where he drinks his coffee and reads his Homer. He insists that rules, including especially the laws of society, destroy the “genuine feeling of nature, as well as its true expression.” He views with disdain the advice followed by so many of the so-called men of the world, to divide your time between business, your mistress, and your accounts, accounts out of which you might make an occasional, but only an occasional, present to your wife. If he were to do this, it would be “all up with his love, and with his genius if he be an artist.” On June 16, he meets Charlotte.

Told by an aunt that Charlotte is engaged to another, and that if he is not careful his heart will be broken, Werther falls in love with her the moment he sees her. When they dance, “I feel myself more than mortal, holding this loveliest of creatures in my arms, flying with her as rapidly as the wind, till I lost sight of every other object.” Charlotte tells him that “Albert is a worthy man, to whom I am engaged,” but three days later, Werther can still write: “My days are as happy as those reserved by God for his elect.” A month later, he is convinced that Charlotte loves him. “How the idea exalts me in my own eyes!” She sometimes lays her hand on his, and this “little familiarity” inflicts an agony upon him. And then, when she “speaks of her betrothed with so much warmth and affection, I feel like a soldier who has been stripped of his honors and titles, and deprived of his sword.”

Werther cannot help liking Albert, though the thought of Albert and Charlotte together breaks his heart. At a certain point, Werther and Albert disagree about the nature of crime. When Albert argues that a man under the influence of a violent passion loses all power of reflection, Werther explodes.

“Oh, you people of sound understandings are ever ready to exclaim ‘Extravagance, and madness, and intoxication! You moral men are so calm and subdued!….I have been more than once intoxicated, my passions have always bordered on extravagance: I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing action have ever been decried by the world as drunken or insane.”

Reading this, is there any doubt what someone like Napoleon would have thought, or why he would have wanted the book a constant companion?

Werther’s passion, this “wild, aimless, endless passion,” makes him Charlotte’s willing slave. His mind, when he is with her, becomes “gradually excited to the highest excess, my sight goes dim, my hearing confused, my breathing oppressed, as by the hand of a murderer.” He feels, he knows, even after she has married Albert, that they are “made for each other.” Sometimes, “lost in reverie,” he “cannot help saying to himself, ‘If Albert were to die?’” Finally, on December 4, he writes to his friend: “It is all over with me. I can support this state no longer.” On Monday, December 21, he writes to Charlotte: “It is all over, Charlotte: I am resolved to die.” He tells her that he “has often conceived the horrid idea of murdering your husband - you - myself!”

He goes to her one last time. Charlotte, who had invited friends to come so they would not be alone, begins to hope that they “might arrive shortly, entertaining at the same time a desire that they might stay away.” She feels “deeply but indistinctly that her own real but unexpressed wish was to retain him for herself.” There is a passionate scene when she finally understands what Werther is going to do. They lose sight of everything, except what they feel. “He clasped her in his arms…and covered her trembling lips with kisses,” the first time this has ever happened. Gently, and then more forcefully, she pushes him away. “Charlotte rose, and, with disordered grief, in mingled tones of love and resentment,” tells him that he will never see her again.

The next day, Werther writes to her for the last time, telling her that for the “first time in my existence, I feel rapture glow within my inmost soul,” and that while Albert may be her husband in this world, she will belong to him in the next. Werther kills himself, but Charlotte does not attend his funeral. She is now so ill that her “life was despaired of.”

How did Goethe write Werther, or, more broadly, how does any great author or artist do anything great? Goethe gave part of the answer in a comment he made about a musician he saw play when he was fourteen and the musician was only seven.

“How can one say Mozart composed Don Juan!….It is a spiritual creation, in which the details, as well as the whole, are pervaded by one spirit, and by the breath of one life.” Mozart, “was altogether in the power of the daemonic spirit of his genius, and acted according to his orders.”

But genius can be destroyed by the “kind of half-culture” that “finds its way into the masses.” He “who does not keep aloof from all this, and isolate himself by main force, is lost.” Isolate, because it is the only way to study and practice excellence, which means, if you are a writer, “Study Moliere, study Shakespeare, but, above all things, the old Greeks, and always the Greeks.” And if that is not the advice anyone is likely to follow today, it only proves what Goethe already feared, that “Barbarism is already here, we are in the midst of it; for wherein does barbarism consist, unless in not appreciating what is excellent!”

It was Goethe’s appreciation of the excellent that made The Sorrows of Young Werther as great, as unique, as it is.

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Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

--Marshal Zeringue