Metropole - October 2017

BOOKS

book review

The Perils of Late Fame

Arthur Schnitzler’s forgotten novella is released in

English, in a stylish translation by Alexander Starritt

by Liam Hoare

Arthur Schnitzler

(trans: Alexander Starritt)

Late Fame

NYRB Classics,

New York, 2017

pp 128

€10

Arthur Schnitzler’s beguiling

novella Late Fame is as much about

the vanity of youth as the foolish-

ness of old age. When the unful-

filled poet Eduard Saxberger falls

in with a group of young artists,

they sing the praises of

Wanderings, his long-forgotten

collection of verse. He becomes in-

toxicated, beginning to believe

their hype. Perhaps he was a great,

unrecognized talent; perhaps he

can write again.

“Around him was an atmosphere

of hope, youth, self-confidence,

and he breathed it in deeply... And

it seemed to him that he belonged

among these people.”

Written in the last decade of the

19th century, Late Fame had been

all but neglected until recently.

Though Schnitzler considered his

novella complete, in 1895 a propos-

al to serialize it in the Viennese

weekly Die Zeit fell through. First

published in German in 2014, it is

now available in English thanks to

The New York Review of Books, sav-

ior of so much lost European fiction,

including Leonid Tsypkin’s master-

piece Summer in Baden Baden.

With an adept translation by

Alexander Starritt, what has been

saved is a slight yet masterful con-

juring of fin-de-siècle Vienna that

is at once perceptive, restrained,

and often witty, a send-up of the

creative milieu of the period. That

the fictional writers circle “Enthu-

siasm” gathers in a café off the

Ringstrasse and refers to itself as

“the pride and hope of Young Vien-

na” recalls Schnitzler’s own liter-

ary circle, which met at Café

Griensteidl and included the writ-

ers Karl Kraus and Stefan Zweig.

YOUNG ENTHUSIASM

Immediately noticeable among the

novella’s young Viennese is their

sheer fecklessness. To call oneself a

writer, one first has to write, but the

members of “Enthusiasm” are

nothing but dandies and fops. They

waste their evenings complaining

about their lack of recognition –

“People have to hear about us, peo-

ple have to know about us” – while

grumbling about those who’ve

made it (presumably because they PHOTOS: WIKICOMMONS, AMAZON.

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