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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
Arthur Schnitzler is best known for his plays, such as La Ronde and The Game of Love, but his short fiction, in which the pulse of early twentieth-century Vienna can be felt as in no other writer, is no less masterly. Characteristic of this observer of the late Habsburg world of balls, adultery and duels is an ironic, bitter-sweet tone reminiscent of another doctor-turned-writer, Anton Chekhov. Schnitzler's intuitive understanding of the human psyche was much admired by his contemporary Sigmund Freud, and the primary focus of his stories is on the volatile, turbulent inner lives of his characters as revealed in dreams, unconscious sexual impulses, and psychopathic states. This volume containing thirteen stories provides the balanced selection of Schnitzler's short fiction that has long been needed. It ranges from short comic tales to dense novellas such as Lieutenant Gustl, Fräulein Else, and the superbly atmospheric late, dramatic tale of love and sudden death The Duellist's Second. Some narratives - as told, for instance, by a deluded bank clerk, or the jealous admirer of another man's wife - are distinctly ambivalent in implication; others feature characters in threshold situations which force them to reappraise their entire lives.