SOURCE: "Intimate Relationships," in New York Times Book Review, February 13, 1983, pp. 27-8.

In the following review, Agee offers a favorable assessment of Keller's collected stories.

Every Swiss, Austrian and East German teenager learns to regard Gottfried Keller, the Swiss writer who spanned the 19th century, from 1819 to 1890, as one of those literary mountain peaks one is forced to scale in the classroom, along with Schiller, Goethe and Heine, before graduating into the relatively undemanding prose of the workaday world. Usually it is one of the tales from Keller's The People of Seldwyla that is proffered, and usually the student discovers that the hike is not only less arduous than expected—the language simpler, less studded with archaisms—but that it offers some surprising diversions: an arresting plot, sentimental appeal without excessive pathos, a few helpful doses of comic relief, a conclusion that satisfies one's moral sense.

Later in...