Description
Book SynopsisThese artful new translations of nine of Arthur Schnitzler's most important stories and novellas—including "Dream Story," on which Stanley Kubrick based his widely acclaimed film Eyes Wide Shut-reinforce the Viennese author's remarkable achievement as literary modernist, depth psychologist, and prose stylist. The psychologically complex and morally ambiguous tales of love and adultery, dream and reality, desire and death in Night Games prove Schnitzler to be fully the equal of his great contemporaries Kafka, Rilke, and Musil, and justify Freud's praise of his knowledge of depth psychology. The collection includes powerful early works such as "The Dead Are Silent" and "Geronimo and His Brother" as well as late masterpieces such as "Night Games" and "Dream Story." Schnitzler creates memorable characters and makes original and masterful use of inner monologue, "stream of consciousness," and unrealiable narrator-techniques that he was among the first, if not the first, to use-to explore the complexities of their inner lives even as he delineates their social world with elegance and wit. The results are comic, tragic, powerful, and psychologically compelling tales of love, sex, and death that often surprise. They are as fresh and relevant to us today, a century later, as when they were first written.
Trade ReviewSimply masterful...These clear, uncluttered translations are dreamlike. * The Review of Higher Education *
Startlingly...life's universal themes are all here: the craving for erotic fulfillment, the fragility of love, the yearning for wealth, and the abruptness of death...these stories are rock-solid. * Publishers Weekly *
One of the most distinctive and compelling voices of the early modernist movement is heard again in this elegant collection of nine urbane, perversely comic, deeply disturbing stories. * Kirkus *
Margret Schaefer's fresh translation of nine stories and novellas brings most back into print for the first time in decades. * The Dallas Morning News *
Table of ContentsPart 1 Foreword vii Part 2 Night Games 3 Part 3 The Dead Are Silent 83 Part 4 Blind Geronimo and His Brother 101 Part 5 A Farewell 125 Part 6 The Second 141 Part 7 Baron von Leisenbohg's Destiny 161 Part 8 The Widower 179 Part 9 Death of a Bachelor 190 Part 10 Dream Story 202
