Product Description
A story collection by the acclaimed Austrian novelist of the early and mid twentieth century, Divertimenti and Variations mediates traditional and experimental story technique to explore the authentic self and creates musically-based narrative forms. These narrative experiments were begun in 1923, not long after the publication of Joyce's Ulysses, with its Sirens chapter structured like a fugue. Traditional psychological realism combines with four-part "symphonic" experimental form complete with development, intermezzi, and thematic repetition and variation to demonstrate how technique is adequate to reveal and resolve conflict. Love interests, family tensions, dreams forcing the dreamers to face their struggles, physical injury, a young blind woman s gaining sight, insanity, unexamined lives Doderer develops these themes by adeptly employing traditional representation, but he does so through innovative narrative structures grounded in the musical formalisms of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Slunj intended to be only part 1 of a trilogy
I liked the book very much until I reached the end, which didn't seem like an ending. When I mentioned this to my Austrian daughter-in-law she explained that Doderer died before completing the trilogy he had planned.

A Perfect Novel
Heimito von Doderer (1896 - 1966) is one of the great Austrian writers of the 20th century. Be came famous with his two novels "The Strudelhofstiege" (1951) and "The Demons" (1956), which explore in a grand sweep Viennese life before World War II. His novel "The Waterfalls of Slunji" came out 1963, three years before his death, and is one of his later works. It is absolutely brilliant. The story is set in Vienna of the 1870s, the time of industrial revolution in the somewhat backwards Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The Claytons, a family of enterprising English engineers and machine manufacturers, come to Vienna and set up a machine manufacturing plant. Robert Clayton and his son Donald Clayton become involved with life in Vienna, they meet people, people meet them, and Doderer weaves a rich tapestry of fates, developments and vignettes. The novel is held altogether by a big composition of longitudinal plot. Donald, the younger Clayton, suffers from indecision, a character trait that becomes already obvious in his youth, when he is not able to overcome a childhood phobia, and which eventually leads decades later to his downfall as he looses the woman he loves to his father and perishes at the waterfalls in Slunj (Croatia, then a part of the Hapsburg Monarchy). Doderer is at his best. All characters come into life. Doderer's humor is at the top of its game. Marvelous! One of the best novels ever!

an interesting period piece, a slightly disappointing novel
While The Waterfalls of Slunj held my attention until its end, it was ultimately a bit disappointing as a novel.The most interesting aspect of the book is its depiction of the mixture of cultures and nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.However, perhaps precisely because of the author's effort to capture a whole social milieu, the individual characters remain somewhat undeveloped and the plot is strangely disjointed.Still, on the whole I found The Waterfalls to be an enjoyable period piece and an illuminating portrait of a fascinating time and place.And what other book are you likely to read whose title contains the word "Slunj"? ... Read more

Product Description
Widowed and newly retired, the turn-of-the-century Austrian civil servant Julius Zihal has left the safe haven of the Tax Office and its orderly, codified administrative practices and now faces a drab and uncertain future alone. This gloomy scene suddenly becomes brighter when he discovers that the lighted windows of the adjacent apartment buildings offer a nightly display of variously-endowed ladies undressing as they prepare for bed. The expected Jekyll and Hyde contrast between Julius' Biedermeier daytime conduct and his nocturnal activities never quite materialises as the bureaucrat within him dominates the voyeur and he attempts to open a file on Eros, as it were, by carefully noting down and categorising all the pertinent details of his observations, rather than simply surrendering to their pleasures. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

What's a retired bureaucrat to do?
This book is a dryly comic account of the predicament of a state bureaucrat, Julius Zihal who, upon his retirement, has to find ways of filling his life. He discovers that mild voyeurism seems to fill the bill, letting him live an emotional life at a remove. Otherwise, Zihal tries to conduct his life according to the procedures and language of the official Handbook of Administrative Practices of the Austro-Hungarian empire, assigning categories and numbers to all feelings and incidents, however unsuited they are to being categorized.Indeed, the handbook is Zihal's lifeblood.When he discovers that a subsection of the Handbook regulations is exactly applicable to his case, he finds it invigorating: "He felt himself summarized and substantiated in the most exacting way." Subsections taken directly from the Handbook are dotted through the handbook that used to administer an empire, and its dense and achingly opaque prose plays against von Doderer's own ironically poetic, simile-filled, narration.It becomes clear that the bureaucrats who wrote the Handbook envisioned a text that could anticipate and regulate every conceivable contingency that might ever arise.These official excerpts reveal the lurking sublimity of their ultimate task, which is to imagine a bureaucratic code that would exist in a 1:1 relationship with absolutely everthing that has ever or might ever happen.

This book is ultimately charming and heartwarming, and is a little modern classic that ought to be better known.Von Doderer's rich descriptions of things and the world, meant to convey the bureaucrat's all encompassing eye, is beautifully translated here. ... Read more

Product Description
novel, Austria, tr Richard & Clara Winston ... Read more