Book Review: The Duty of Genius
Assessing the life of a philosopher may be a writer’s greatest challenge – with few individuals do the spiritual and emotional realms play such a prominent role in moulding professional consequences. With that in mind, author Ray Monk sets off on a very specific quest in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Duty of Genius – to draw, where [...]
Book Review: When Even The Poets Were Silent
When you pick up When Even the Poets were Silent, the weight of this elegant memoir might slide right past. George Pogany has a light touch for his story of hardship, a Jewish Hungarian’s journey from rural Orosháza to war-ridden Vienna and back, as Communism engulfs the country and flight becomes the only option. It [...]
Book Review: Night Falls on the City
The annals of publishing history are rife with writers lost in the grinding wheels of intellectual fashion. So it is especially gratifying when a deserving novel, like Sarah Gainham’s Night Falls on the City, is retrieved from obscurity. A best-seller when it first appeared in 1967, this powerful work of descriptive fiction has been republished [...]
Book Review: Iron Curtain
Perhaps what is most often forgotten in the more intellectual-inclined discourses of political theory and Marxism is the basic fact that civil society – that sphere that is organically nongovernmental and, if desired, apolitical – is the vibrant lifeblood that allows discourse, and culture, to arise. The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci long held that [...]
Book Review: The Plan
The Plan, Gerhard Roth’s newly translated crime novel, tells of the transformation of Konrad Feldt, a sickly and isolated at Vienna’s Nationalbibliothek who finds himself in possession of a priceless scrap of manuscript after the original thief commits suicide. Planning to sell the document and change his life, Feldt journeys to Japan, where the illegible [...]
Book Review: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea
Culture is so often the child of politics and is, like history, co-opted by those who won the last war. In the Anglo-American mind, Paris has long eclipsed Vienna as the home of modernism. Existentialism is said to have started with Sartre and Camus rather than with Schnitzler and Rilke. Ravel’s La Valse, a tone-poem [...]
Book Review: Traveller of the Century
“Who is responsible for deciding where a work sits in the literary hierarchy…?” asks Hans, the protagonist of Andrés Neuman’s prize-winning novel, Traveller of the Century. “Who decides which books are nonsensical? The critics? The press? The universities? Oh, please don’t start telling us that all opinions are relative, let’s show some nerve, someone has [...]
Book Review: The Taste of Ashes
“You know, the human being is rather perverse,” Gabriel, a former Romanian dissident, told Marci Shore in the spring of 1995. He was referring to the nostalgia felt by some of his countrymen for the despotic Stalinist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, which came as a surprise to the young graduate student then working for a [...]
Edmund de Waal speaks at Palais Epstein
Here I am in Vienna. I feel at home. This palais seems about the right size. It has certainly got the appropriate amount of gilding, and the marble seems familiar. I’m happy to see the caryatids and the mouldings and that the ceilings are lively with good painting. The view from the windows is grand [...]
