My First Wife
  • Published: 20 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141391809
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $34.99

My First Wife

Formats & editions
EBook
21 Nov 2012
Paperback
20 Nov 2013
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The powerful account of a marriage - and its collapse - in Michael Hofmann's masterful 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. He thinks he can mould Ganna into what he wants. But no one can control her troubling passions. Based on Jakob Wassermann's own ruinous marriage, My First Wife bears the unmistakable aura of true and bitter experience, telling a story of rare intensity that unfolds in shocking detail.
  • Published: 20 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141391809
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $34.99
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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. Hofmann 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

[Wassermann's] most elegant and focused work

London Review of Books

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

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