Icon in Love: A Novel About Goethe

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

Goethe, the great German author (novelist, poet, essayist, dramatist,
scientist), lived to be quite old and, like Charlie Chaplin, Sartre,
Picasso, Saul Bellow and others, had, in the course of his life, several
love affairs. At 72, he fell in love with 17-year-old Ulrike von
Levetzow. He wanted to marry her; she rejected him. Later she had many
suitors, but never married. Shortly before her death, at almost 100
years, she declared to a friend that no man could have loved her like
Goethe and that she would have been bored with any other man.

Eric Koch, a German-born writer and Canadian broadcaster, uses this
romance as the basis for Icon in Love. He places Goethe in the 20th
century, awards him the Nobel Prize, and has him embroiled in a
cloak-and-dagger story of jealousy and murder among the laureates.
Literary historians and Goethe devotees will delight in Koch’s use of
quotations from Goethe’s works and letters, as well as from books of
his critics and biographers. The novel is witty, entertaining, and
meticulously researched. Although Koch falls short in conveying the pain
the great man must have felt at being rejected, his portrait of a
20th-century Goethe is quite an achievement.