A review by morbid_swither
The Lake of the Bees by Alan Sillitoe, Theodor Storm

4.0

Reread; this was an assignment in German Literature coursework at Hardin-Simmons University. A brief and quiet book written smack-dab in the middle of the 19th Century by an author beloved in his native Germany. “Immensee” (“The Lake of the Bees”) is noteworthy to me for the sustainment of a consistent elegiac narrative voice, the pleasure of its evocations of pastorality and landscape, and the richness of its symbolism. Some note the subtlety of its latent political messages, which mostly were lost on me. As a fine example of literary realism, and one marked unusually by a poetic sentimentality, this book is worth reading. My fondness for it, and ultimately what warranted a second read, was the sublimity with which the narrator, Reinhardt, recalls the bygone days of his youth and his dissolved early romance with the darling Elisabeth. The novella’s effectiveness in reflecting on memory and loss, and certainly how it achieves to offer so much more than what would met the eye, made this a great choice to revisit. Though not nearly as angsty as a piece of Sturm und Drang, the Romantic themes are sublimated in a neatly constructed work that seems to have made an impression on the bourgeois German writers of the 20th Century, as well as—though to a lesser extent—the masterful Peter Handke.