My First Wife
  • Published: 21 November 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141389363
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

My First Wife

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EBook
21 Nov 2012
Paperback
20 Nov 2013
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A powerful account of a marriage - and its collapse - in a masterful new translation

Alexander Herzog, a young writer, goes to Vienna to escape his debts and a failed love affair. There he is pursued by book-loving Ganna: giddy, girlish, clumsy, eccentric and wild. Dazzled and unnerved by her devotion to him, and attracted to the large dowry offered by her wealthy father, he thinks he can mould Ganna into what he wants. But no-one can control her troubling passions. As their marriage starts to self-destruct, Herzog will discover that Ganna has resources and determination of which he had no idea - and that he can never escape her.

Posthumously published in 1934 and based on Wassermann's own ruinous marriage, My First Wife bears the unmistakable aura of true and bitter experience. It is a tragic masterpiece that unfolds in shocking detail. Now this story of rare intensity and drama is brought to English readers in a powerful new translation by Michael Hofmann.
  • Published: 21 November 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141389363
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
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Praise for My First Wife

The candour and extremity and intelligence of My First Wife are profoundly affecting ... This is a literary masterwork of a vanished kind, but through the remarkable Hofmann it is born again as a story for our age. Hogmann has the rare ability to refresh the very heart of a text in translating it, to increase its connections to life

Rachel Cusk, Guardian

The opening pages of this novel are ike something out of Chekhov - it's all there, the ennui, the preening etiquette, the intellectual posturing ... painfully heartfelt ... My First Wife is a devastating indictment of the choices we make out of convenience against our hearts and instincts, and the tragedies that ensue

Independent

You won't find a more agonising, fascinating literary account of a marriage hitting the rocks

Mail Online

[Wassermann's] most elegant and focused work

London Review of Books