Skip to content

Irretrievable (New York Review Books Classics)
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

Irretrievable (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback - 2011

by Fontane, Theodor

  • Used

Description

UsedVeryGood The cover is clean but does show some wear. .
UsedVeryGood The cover is clean but does show some wear.
NZ$6.84
NZ$8.32 Shipping to USA
Standard delivery: 3 to 12 days
More Shipping Options
Ships from Goodwill of the San Francisco Bay (California, United States)
The BIBLIO Guarantee | Ask Seller a Question

Details

About Goodwill of the San Francisco Bay California, United States

Biblio member since 2021
Seller rating: This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.

SF Goodwill is a non-profit social enterprise. We are committed to providing a second chance to tens of thousands of local people with barriers to employment through training and the power of work.

Terms of Sale:

Every book you buy on Biblio is backed by a 30 day return guarantee.

Biblio.com customers may return a book for a refund and/or exchange (if a copy is available from the bookseller) within the following terms and conditions:

If the order does not arrive within 7 business days of the estimated delivery date for domestic shipments, or within 14 business days of the estimated delivery date for international shipments, you are eligible for a full refund of the purchase price, including shipping costs. You must contact Biblio.com within 30 days of the estimated delivery date to initiate a refund for an order lost in transit.

If the book is returned to the bookseller for one of the above reasons, or a similar reason, the refund price will include the book price only. You must contact Biblio.com within 30 days of the estimated delivery date to initiate this refund.

You are eligible to receive a full refund of the purchase price, including the original shipping costs, if your return is a result of an error on the bookseller's part. Refunds on return shipping costs are at the discretion of the participating bookseller or Biblio.com. To receive a refund, you must send the item directly to the bookseller within 30 days of the estimated delivery date, in the same condition in which it was received. Please be sure to contact support@biblio.com before returning your item to the bookseller.

Browse books from Goodwill of the San Francisco Bay

From the publisher


Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), novelist, critic, poet, and travel writer, was one of the most celebrated nineteenth-century German men of letters. He was born into a French Huguenot family in the Prussian town of Neuruppin, where his father owned a small pharmacy. His father’s gambling debts forced the family to move repeatedly, and eventually his temperamentally mismatched parents separated. Though Fontane showed early interest in history and literature—jotting down stories into school notebooks—he could not afford to attend university; instead he apprenticed as a pharmacist and eventually settled in Berlin. There he joined the influential literary society Tunnel über der Spree, which included among its members Theodor Storm and Gottfried Keller, and turned to writing. In 1850 Fontane’s first published books, two volumes of ballads, appeared; they would prove to be his most successful books during his lifetime. He spent the next four decades working as a critic, journalist, and war correspondent while producing some fifty works of history, travel narrative, and fiction. His early novels, the first of which was published in 1878, when Fontane was nearly sixty, concerned recent historical events. It was not until the late 1880s that he turned to his great novels of modern society, remarkable for their psychological insight: Trials and Tribulations (1888), Irretrievable (1891), Frau Jenny Treibel (1892), and Effi Briest (1895). During his last years, Fontane returned to writing poetry, and, while recovering from a severe illness, wrote an autobiographical novel that would prove to be a late commercial success. He is buried in the French section of the Friedhof II cemetery in Berlin.


 
Douglas Parmée (1914–2008) was a lecturer in modern languages at Cambridge and a Lifetime Fellow of Queens’ College. He translated many works of classic and contemporary literature from French, Italian, and German, receiving the the Scott Moncrieff Prize for French translation in 1976. NYRB Classics publishes his
translations of The Child by Jules Vallès, Afloat by Guy de Maupassant, and Nature Stories by Jules Renard.


 
Phillip Lopate is the author of the essay collections Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, Being with Children, Portrait of My Body, and Totally, Tenderly, Tragically; and of the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of a Summer.

Media reviews

“[Irretrievable is] one of Fontane’s most idiosyncratic achievements, and certainly one of the finest literary autopsies of a foundering relationship…. The pleasure of the novel lies in its subtlety—in this case, a discreet exploration of marital psychology. Here again, trouble starts within and, like a dry rot, eats its way outward….But even after the couple ostensibly reconcile, there’s really nothing left; by the end of this mild yet anguished work, all that remains of the marriage is a lifeless residue of thwarted yearning—‘nothing but the willingness to be happy.’ As so often in the fiction of Theodor Fontane, that’s not enough to save the characters, but it’s a marvellous subject for a novel.” – Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker

“A minor masterpiece of translation. . . ” —The Times Literary Supplement

“No writer of past or present stirs in me that kind of sympathy and gratitude, that immediate, instinctive delight, that reflex gaiety, warmth, and satisfaction, which I feel reading any of Fontane’s verse, any line of his letters, any scrap of dialogue.”
—Thomas Mann
 

About the author


Theodor Fontane (1819-1898), novelist, critic, poet, and travel writer, was one of the most celebrated nineteenth-century German men of letters. He was born into a French Huguenot family in the Prussian town of Neuruppin, where his father owned a small pharmacy. His father's gambling debts forced the family to move repeatedly, and eventually his temperamentally mismatched parents separated. Though Fontane showed early interest in history and literature--jotting down stories into school notebooks--he could not afford to attend university; instead he apprenticed as a pharmacist and eventually settled in Berlin. There he joined the influential literary society Tunnel ber der Spree, which included among its members Theodor Storm and Gottfried Keller, and turned to writing. In 1850 Fontane's first published books, two volumes of ballads, appeared; they would prove to be his most successful books during his lifetime. He spent the next four decades working as a critic, journalist, and war correspondent while producing some fifty works of history, travel narrative, and fiction. His early novels, the first of which was published in 1878, when Fontane was nearly sixty, concerned recent historical events. It was not until the late 1880s that he turned to his great novels of modern society, remarkable for their psychological insight: Trials and Tribulations (1888), Irretrievable (1891), Frau Jenny Treibel (1892), and Effi Briest (1895). During his last years, Fontane returned to writing poetry, and, while recovering from a severe illness, wrote an autobiographical novel that would prove to be a late commercial success. He is buried in the French section of the Friedhof II cemetery in Berlin.



Douglas Parme (1914-2008) was a lecturer in modern languages at Cambridge and a Lifetime Fellow of Queens' College. He translated many works of classic and contemporary literature from French, Italian, and German, receiving the the Scott Moncrieff Prize for French translation in 1976. NYRB Classics publishes his
translations of The Child by Jules Valls, Afloat by Guy de Maupassant, and Nature Stories by Jules Renard.



Phillip Lopate is the author of the essay collections Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, Being with Children, Portrait of My Body, and Totally, Tenderly, Tragically; and of the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of a Summer.

Hang on… we’re fetching the requested page.