A man in full

摘要

WHEN Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was in his 60s, he recalled a friend of his youth once telling him, "What you live is better than what you write." On reflection, Goethe said, "It would please me if that were still true." In a biography of the great German writer and polymath, Rue-diger Safranski sets out to show that Goethe was more than the sum of his works, outstanding though they were; in fact, he conceived his entire life as a work of art, with a beginning, a middle and an end.