RRP: £9.95
BINDING: Paperback
PUBLISHED: 2002
ISBN: 9780946162437
PAGES: 200
Theodor Fontane
Cécile
Translated from the German by Stanley Radcliffe
Theodor Fontane, chronicler of post-1871 Berlin in its new role as capital of a unifed Germany, is now regarded as one of the outstanding German novelists. Cécile (1887) is the first of a brilliant trio of female portraits culminating in Effi Briest (1895). The Baroness von St Arnaud, a delicate beauty married to a retired army officer who neglects her, is a tantalising mystery to the much-travelled civil engineer von Gordon who makes her acquaintance at the fashionable spa of Thale in the Harz Mountains. The reader’s curiosity, too, is more and more strongly aroused as a story of mutual sexual attraction unfolds. When the scene shifts to the bustling world of the capital and the sharply caricatured reactionary high society in which the St Arnauds move, Cécile’s admirer’s discovery of her past precipitates a grim climax.
‘Written with the concision and directness of a short story, this novel nonetheless conveys an astonishingly full picture of German society in rapid and often costly change.’ – The Times
‘Cécile is a spa novel, a tragedy of passionate trivia, foolish neglect and nervous disorders on a scale of one to 10 … It is composed like a social comedy, but gradually darkens as the fated trio is recalled to the city, their mysteries are stripped away from them and the end comes like a sudden fall of night. Cécile is written with wit and a controlled fury and Radcliffe’s elegant translation does it superb justice.’ – Michael Ratcliffe, The Observer
THEODOR FONTANE (1819–98), of French descent and brought up on the Prussian Baltic coast, spent much of his life as a journalist. He was for several years a foreign correspondent in London, and subsequently chronicled the life and history of Berlin’s hinterland and Bismarck’s wars. The first of his seventeen works of fiction, Before the Storm, was published when he was fifty-nine.