Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
An NYRB Classics Original
One seemingly ordinary evening, Eduard Saxberger arrives home to find the fulfillment of a long-forgotten wish in his sitting room: A visitor has come to tell him that the youth of Vienna have discovered his poetic genius. Saxberger has written nothing for thirty years, yet he now realizes that he is more than merely an Unremarkable Civil Servant after all: He s a Venerable Poet for whom Late Fame is inevitable if, that is, his new acolytes are to be believed.
Arthur Schnitzler was one of the most admired, provocative European writers of the twentieth century. The Nazis attempted to burn all of his work, but his archive was miraculously saved, and with it, Late Fame. Never published before, it is a treasure, a perfect satire of literary self-regard and charlatanism."
Synopsis
A hilarious takedown of celebrity and false genius, never before available in the US.
An NYRB Classics Original
One seemingly ordinary evening, Eduard Saxberger arrives home to find the fulfillment of a long-forgotten wish in his sitting room: A visitor has come to tell him that the youth of Vienna have discovered his poetic genius. Saxberger has written nothing for thirty years, yet he now realizes that he is more than merely an Unremarkable Civil Servant after all: He's a Venerable Poet for whom Late Fame is inevitable--if, that is, his new acolytes are to be believed.
Arthur Schnitzler was one of the most admired, provocative European writers of the twentieth century. The Nazis attempted to burn all of his work, but his archive was miraculously saved, and with it, Late Fame. Never published before, it is a treasure, a perfect satire of literary self-regard and charlatanism.
Synopsis
A hilarious takedown of celebrity and false genius, never before available in the US. An NYRB Classics Original
Eduard Saxberger is a quiet man who is getting on in years and has spent the better part of them working at a desk in an office. Once upon a time, however, he published a book of poetry, Wanderings, and one day when he returns from his usual walk he finds a young man waiting for him. "Are you," he wants to know, "Saxberger the poet?"
Is Saxberger Saxberger the poet? Was he ever a poet? A real poet? Saxberger hasn't written a poem for years, but he begins to frequent the coffee shops of Vienna with his young admirer and his no less admiring circle of friends, and as he does he begins to yearn for a different life from the daily round followed by rounds of drinks and billiards with familiar buddies like Grossinger, the deli owner. And the ardent attentions of Fraulein Gasteiner, the tragedienne, are not entirely unwelcome.
The Hope of Young Vienna is how the young artists style themselves, and they are arranging an event that will introduce them to the world. They insist that the distinguished author of Wanderings take part in it as well. Will he write something new for the occasion? Will he at last receive his due?
Late Fame, an unpublished novella recently rediscovered in the papers of the great turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, is a bittersweet parable of hope lost and found.