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Summary: It's book not for describing but for READING
Review: If you can dive in reading as if book pages were crystal water, if you can fall in love with Romeo and dream about walking in the wood with Robin Hood - it is the book for you. Just try not to think that tomorrow you'll have interview and your child can't get through arithmetics... Take some time for yourself, cup of coffee and this book. The mood of this book is great for stormy weather and dark room.
I don't think there is a person who would dislike this book. If you did - think: maybe it wasn't good time for reading? Maybe you read it in bus while going to (or even worth - from) work? Try again in slow tempo and somewhat romantic mood.
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Summary: The greatest book ever written
Review: Nothing could ever surpass this book in scope or beauty. This book asks the question: is life worth living? is it worth it to strive? or is the suicidal nihilism of Mephistopheles the only product having attained a great amount of experience? Part I is brilliant and romantic. The Gretchen tragedy is, in my mind, greater than Romeo and Juliet. Part II is classical. Though much more obscure in its references, it too manages to achieve great beauty and import. And all this not in the original language. Read this book.
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Summary: Science and Work create all riches and bring salvation
Review: The first Faust is a marvellous romantic tragedy. Dr Faust sells his soul to the devil to be young forever and enjoy life. And he sure does. He seduces the young Gretchen and impregnates her, which is a crime for the woman in those days in Germany. She will be imprisoned because of her fornication and she will become crazy. She will refuse to elope with Dr Faust and she will die on the gallows. The play is extremely fascinating with some interludes that are devilish pageants with witches and wizards, and a direct allusion to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream that is shifted from an entertaining fairy-dream to a wicked and perverse diabolic Sabbath-night. This first Faust has been the model for many adaptations, particularly for the opera.
The second Faust is introduced by a long sequence of illusions and impersonifications of historical figures entertwined with tricks and antics performed by Dr Faust at the German Emperor's court. But this second Faust centers on Faust's love for Helen of Troy. A mystical and pure love. It turns sour when their son tries to fly like Icarus, falls to the ground and dies. He had internalized his father's dream to equal the Gods, to go against all rules of nature. This triggers the disappearance of Helen and Faust's fall. Yet Goethe redeems Faust by making him understand that his science must not be used for his sole pleasure but to govern and inspire the work of simple people and make them build up a rich country gained on the sea with dams and canals. When he thus understands that knowledge associated with work can create a real paradise on earth he is redeemed by God and accepted in Heaven after the intermission of three paternal patriarchal figures (the three judges of the old Greek mythology that greeted the dead to sort them out and send them to Hell or Heaven), the three penitent women that were at the foot of the Cross, the Holy Virgin herself, and Gretchen that had been deemed pure and innocent by God. Thus Faust announces the 19th century and the industrial revolution that will create riches from the association of science and work.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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Summary: goethe is a master of influence
Review: there is little wonder why authors like Nabokov, Bely, Bulgakov etc. have used this book as a foundation for many of their most famous books. faust is simply exquisite. Open the first page and embark into the world of Goethe, there is little wonder why faust took fifty years to complete. Be warned, though, that once delved into, the external world will appear mundane and worthless. Faust is a must read for anyone who is willing to devote the necessary time to completely understand the element of absurdity (as according to camus). read and find out if a fifty year vacation with the devil is worth your soul. A MUST BUY NOW!
Rating:
Summary: goethe is a master of influence
Review: there is little wonder why authors like Nabokov, Bely, Bulgakov etc. have used this book as a foundation for many of their most famous books. faust is simply exquisite. Open the first page and embark into the world of Goethe, there is little wonder why faust took fifty years to complete. Be warned, though, that once delved into, the external world will appear mundane and worthless. Faust is a must read for anyone who is willing to devote the necessary time to completely understand the element of absurdity (as according to camus). read and find out if a fifty year vacation with the devil is worth your soul. A MUST BUY NOW!
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Summary: Wonderful
Review: This book can easily become the most "reread" book of your collection. Fantastically entertaining :>
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Summary: In Faust II, the devil is fooled
Review: This play is rarely performed, if ever. It is too complicated, too complex, and full of numerous special effects. It is fantastique to the extreme. It also entertwines several lines. First the Emperor. He is captivated by some magic and the apparition of Helen and Paris. This is enough to bring the Court to extreme pleasure. Then this Emperor is lured into creating paper-money. The Empire becomes rich with that money that comes from nowhere. This is of course a criticism of paper money that is invented by the French Revolution, based on all the religious and noble estates that have been requisitioned by the government and are being sold. This episode will end three acts later. This paper money has developed total anarchy because it has made everyone willing and desirous to freely implement their initiative. In other words it has created unregulated free enterprise. Then order has become a demand from the people and they have more or less unified behind a new self-appointed Enperor. Hence a civil war. This vision is absolutely prophetic about the dictatorships that emerged from this nineteenth century's capitalism. Faust and Mephistopheles will provide the old Emperor with victory in exchange of Faust's possession of the coast. The second line is that of the deepest layers of the magical and mythological realms. We go down into the world of the Meres, and of all the fantastique monsters of all mythologies. It becomes a Walpurgis night of a new type and Faust learns how vain and evanescent these beings may be. You cannot count on them to hold their promises. It is fascinating but also totally frustrating. Nothing real can come out of it. And yet, third line, Faust is able to save and conquer Helen just after her return to Greece, just before her being put to death by Melenas. She lives in an old Gothic castle with Faust and she is able to give Faust a son, Euphorion, who will be inspired by Faust so well into believing that anything is possible and desirable, particularly flying in the sky, that he will reenact the experience of Icarus and will fall to the ground and die, and in fact vanish, leaving behind his clothes and lyra. This will determine in its turn the vanishing of Helen. At this point of these three lines Faust finally understands that Mephistopheles can only provide him with illusions, nothing real. And yet, fourth line, he gets from the Emperor the coast along which he is going to implement his ideas, thanks to the real work of people. His mind has thought a way to conquer earth from the sea with dams and canals. Thousands of workers build these polders and create a new rich country that can prosper economically ; His mind, associated to thousands of hands, can create a rich country and bring comfort and wealth to thousands of people who deserve it thanks to and earn it through their work. It is then that Faust dies and Mephistopheles wants to take possession of his soul, as promised a long time agao with a signature in blood. But angels come down and lure his lust into forgetting about his aim and they capture Faust's soul and take it into the sky. That is when Faust's redemption becomes possible, fifth line. He has to be examined by three fatherly figures, three patriarchs, and then defended by three women, among whom Gretchen is one essential figure, and these three women have to convince the Holy Virgin of the redeemable dimension of Faust's soul, which she accepts on the basis of the good he had come to in his last living phase, and because Gretchen actually forgives him for his luring her into a lustful affair that caused her being put to death. This play is a sharp criticism of emerging capitalism and its selfish free enterprise spirit. It is a criticism of the simulacra this new emerging society represents : paper money, phantasms, the chase for pleasure, the rejection of religion and of all ethics, the vanity of fake magical knowledge, the illusion of living in some mythical imagined world, etc. It is also the advocacy of the real world, of nature, of implementable knowledge, of science applied to nature in order to improve the lot of humanity, in order for humanity to improve their lot through their own work. Then we can see that Goethe in his mature old age rethinks the world of his younger spirit through a complete reassessment of all human spiritual constructions and illusions. It is a real descent into the hell of a spirit that does not want to acknowledge any limits to its adventurous passions. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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