Green Henry

By Gottfried Keller

Book Overview

Green Henryis a vivid and absorbing representation of Gottfried Keller's ideals and philosophy, written in poetic language and a realistic style that documents the emergence of an artist and the development of a man. Partly autobiographical, the narrative recounts the experiences of the title character ("green" after the color of clothing he always wears) through confinement and ostracism at boarding school, apprenticeship with a painter in Munich, his divided affection for two women, and the acceptance of his duty toward his country and fellow citizens. Admired by Nietzsche (who called Keller "the only living German writer") and included by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon, Green Henryis one of the undisputed masterpieces of world literature.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1585674273
• ISBN13: 9781585674275
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Overlook Press
• Length: 706 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.7" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Green as Money, Green as Moss

Henry Lee, the narrator-hero of this translated German classic, got his nickname as a child in school because of his clothing, made by his widowed mother from the green cloth of his dead father's old uniforms. But "Grüner Heinrich" is green in more ways than one. Green is explicitly the color of Hope in this novel by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, and Hope is often all that Green Henry has to live on. Green is also symbolic of Nature, of the trees and alpine meadows that sustain Henry's will-to-live; Keller's verbal evocations of evergreen Nature in his native Switzerland are truly magnificent in German, and they are well rendered by translator A.M. Holt into English. Foremost, nevertheless, is the 'popular' connotation of the color green as symbolic of naive inexperience, the meaning expressed by the slang word "greenhorn". And 'ach du lieber!', is our Henry ever a greenhorn! He's green as a boy raised by a doting mother - and as a city boy sent to develop among his sturdier country cousins - and green as a youth who tries to make himself popular by joining in mischief despite feeling guilty, thereby getting himself unfairly expelled from school - green again in his aspiration to become a great artist more or less merely by declaring himself one - and greenest of all in Love. Four, count 'em four!, beautiful and fascinating girl-women are the idols of Henry's worship in the course of this novel. All four are in fact realistically depicted as worthy of some idolization; author Keller should be credited with creating some of the most impressively plausible heroines of 19th C literature. Meanwhile, something in our Green Henry attracts the devotion of each of the four women to him, and yet the relationships are never consummated, either emotionally or physically. Green symbolizes virginity for the young man, also, despite a good deal of understated debauchery in Henry's years as a student in old Nuremburg. "Grüner Heinrich" is regarded as one of the master works of German fiction. It's included by the redoubtable critic harold Bloom in the "canon of Western classics." If you take this recommendation and read it, assuming you enjoy it, you'll have at least a month to nurture your gratitude toward me; that is, it will take you a month or more to read it. It's very long - 700 pages of small type - and discursive, with as many interpolated tales and fables as Don Quixote. Several lengthy chapters are devoted to Henry's fantastic dreams, surreal and symbolic but not precisely crafted to advance the narrative. The largest part of Henry's narrative of his years in Nuremburg is devoted to the romances of his two closets friends there, misadventures in which Henry himself is only a bumbling sidekick. Honestly, I fear that most 21st C readers will be patience-challenged by Keller's placid, philosophical, parenthetical discourse. And yet, this is a great book. It's precisely "the still water that runs deep." It has integrity above all. Though Henry is a