( Where did we meet that character before? When is this party happening?) As in Proust, people vanish and reappear in different guises, hundreds of pages later, or exit the novel, unmentioned, never to return. Doderer’s Vienna is as lovingly mapped as Balzac’s Paris, Joyce’s Dublin, Dickens’s London.īut the more traditional elements are scrambled by his modernist disregard for the conventions of chronology, introduction, and explanation, his lack of interest in the helpful signposts and directions that orient readers in time and space.

Lengthy set pieces transport us to a bear hunt in Bosnia, a rock-climbing expedition, a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, married life in Buenos Aires, a drunken dance party at a country hotel where a love affair of many years comes to a humiliating end. We can measure the distance between their social personae and their authentic selves. The book offers all the rewards of nineteenth-century fiction: we know what these people wear, how they decorate their homes, what kind of cigarettes they smoke. They drape themselves around the louche apartment of Captain Eulenfeld, an alcoholic Prussian aristocrat, former cavalry officer, and cigarette smuggler whose contaminating influence is so widespread that a character describes him as “a kind of disease.” Everyone is seducing everyone else, or already has, or is plotting a future seduction.

They’re too busy enjoying the fast life, at cafés and parties, in sports cars, on country walks, at tennis games and in bedrooms. We know what these bankers, lawyers, writers, bureaucrats, and civil servants do for a living, but we rarely see them at work.

Set in 1908–19–1925, The Strudlhof Steps introduces us to a Viennese circle of bright young and not-so-bright-or-young things: ingénues, soldiers, students, musicians, petty crooks, all entwined by decades of flirtations and romances, deep philosophical friendships and family connections, infidelities and breakups. A classic of German-language literature, first published in 1951, it is only now appearing in English, in Vincent Kling’s deft translation. This hugely original book requires intense concentration to follow its switchback plot turns, to navigate its confusing leaps in time, to untangle its page-long metaphors, but most of all to keep track of its enormous cast of characters. I began reading Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps at the start of the Omicron surge, when the threat of another winter lockdown made it seem like the perfect moment for a dense and demanding 850-page Austrian novel.

Francine prose the vixen review