From Publishers Weekly
This reprint of a 1927 American edition gives a new generation of English-speaking readers the opportunity to discover the Viennese novelist and dramatist's (1862-1931) haunting erotic fantasy, which blends dreams and reality. Summoned to a patient's bedside, Fridolin, a physician, begins a night-long journey through events in which he is merely an ineffectual observer. Finding his patient dead, Fridolin wanders the streets, is insulted by a student and responds aggressively--in his imagination. He meekly follows a prostitute to her rooms, but is frozen by fear. Entering a bizarre costume party uninvited and arrogantly challenging a guest to a duel, he is saved by an anonymous woman who buys his freedom with her life. Returning home, Fridolin wakes his wife, Albertina, who describes her own adventure, a dream in which the ever-faithful Fridolin is crucified while she laughs at his horrible death. Schnitzler's characters ultimately return from these sleeping and waking "dreams," but the daily routine in which they take refuge is shown to be a veneer, pasted over the unresolved, unsettling problems that color this portrait of the soul's double
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Book Description
Amidst a short spat between a married couple, the husband, a doctor, is summoned to the bedside of a dying man. So begins a series of involvements throughout the night in increasingly dangerous and deviant sexual adventures for Fridolin, who taken by a friend to a "secret" party, is forced to make choices that seem beyond his control. The dream-like events are made more frighteningly real by Schnitzler's powerfully detailed descriptions, as little by little Fridolin gives in to the demands of the secret celebrants.Order may be restored, but the desperation, the depravity of the human mind remains just below the surface of the conscious willing of good.
A doctor himself and close friend of Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler was one of the most important playwrights and novelists of early 20th-century Austrian literature.
