Late Fame
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 Fräulein 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Late Fame, an unpublished novella recently rediscovered in the papers of the great turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, is a bittersweet parable of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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Completed over a century ago but unpublished until now, Schnitzler's droll, engrossing short novel of artists in 1890s Vienna tempers its satire with keen insight. The elderly Eduard Saxberger wrote plays and poetry in his youth but has long since withdrawn from the world of letters into the "soft and muffled" life of a career civil servant. His old ambitions are reawakened by a young writer, Wolfgang Meier, who has discovered Saxberger's sole published book of poems, Wanderings, in a secondhand shop. Drawn by Meier into an admiring circle of young would-be artistic types, including the truculent critic Blink, the disheveled playwright Christian, the histrionic actress Gasteiner, and the young Winder, who writes "everything," Saxberger begins to believe that his decades as "a useful member of human society" have been wasted, and he is "indeed a poet." But when the group plans to put on a recital to present their work, Saxberger must compose new verses, and his supposed genius is put to the test. Schnitzler's send up of both artistic pretension and hoi polloi fatuity is brilliant, but his narrative is ultimately less satirical than humane. Saxberger continually revises his ideas of both the artistic vocation and a quiet existence among the bourgeoisie, finding that the effects of fame on an artist's work are imponderable: "Who, in the end, can guarantee you the encouragement and the recognition?" Readers are fortunate to have this late publication.
