On Tangled Paths

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From Germany’s greatest 19th-century novelist, this realist masterpiece interrogates the strict social codes of a rapidly changing era through a wistful struggle between love and o bligation. Lene is an orphaned seamstress; Botho is a nobleman and an officer in one of the Prussian army’s most glittering regiments. But despite their differences of class and education, they fall quickly in love, spending a summer together in a clear-eyed, tender love affair before society’s demands force them cruelly apart. Now married to a wealthy cousin, Botho learns years later that Lene too has an opportunity to marry. Her ex-lover must choose between holding on to regret or letting go of the past – along with the possibility of getting Lene herself back. Unusually progressive for literature of the period, this masterwork of Fontane’s portrays a love story that defies class boundaries, full of tender irony and vivid evocations of a quickly expanding Berlin and its bucolic surroundings. Fontane bring sharp psychological insight to his achingly sympathetic portrayal of two lovers torn between their hearts and the obligations of social circumstance. Show more