The Art of Adultery

A surprisingly new look at three masterpieces of the modern age – Wolfgang Matz gives us breathtaking reading material.

Love and deceit have always been the eternal themes of literature, from Tristan and Isolde to Don Giovanni – but in the middle of the 19th century, a new variation on an old theme in the social novel suddenly appeared: adultery in the bourgeois family. Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest – these are the three famous women who do the forbidden thing and risk losing their entire existence for the sake of another man. Emma, the radical player, Anna, the passionate lover, and the naïve Effi, who is far too young and fails to resist a fleeting opportunity.
In his temperamental book, Wolfgang Matz traces the stories of these completely different women, their husbands and their lovers, to ascertain why their private failure – between the desire for personal freedom and the constraints of social order – held such a fascination for their creators Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoi and Theodor Fontane, and what effect this had on their writing.

»Wolfgang Matz has a gift for presenting literary history in a brand new way.«
Jan Süselbeck, Jungle World

Wolfgang Matz, born in 1955, lived in Poitiers (France) from 1987 to 1995, where he taught at the Institute of German Language and Literature and worked as a literary translator. Since then he has worked as a publishing editor in Munich. He was awarded the Paul Celan Prize and the Petrarca Prize for his translations of French prose and lyric poetry.
Publications include: 1857. Flaubert, Baudelaire, Stifter (2007); Gewalt des Gewordenen. Zum Werk Adalbert Stifters (The Power of what has become. The Work of Adalbert Stifter, 2005)