Heimito von Doderer Books

Seminal on Doderer in English. The expansions by the translator Vincent Kling are admirable, provocative, necessary, ingenious.

I'm not quite the author, and I'm not quite not the author! This book originally appeared in German, in 1983, in Vienna; I have translated it into English, added almost all the footnotes and the bibliography, and have written a new chapter, "From District to Empire."

Aside from my lifelong love of Austrian literature and my fascination with Heimito von Doderer, I was drawn to Pfeiffer's book by its practicality, its clarity, and its modesty. It makes none of the hugely overexalted claims many academic books feel they have to make, opting instead to present itself as part guidebook to the neighborhoods of Vienna which Doderer used in his novels, part biography of Doderer, and part interpretation of his two most significant works of fiction. But trust me, this is not "interpretation lite." Pfeiffer--a retired psychotherapist--offers a number of facts about Doderer's life and artistic process that won't be found elsewhere, and he presents trenchant, simple, and often highly original insights into the novels. His expert knowledge comes from his long friendship with Doderer's widow and other associates and from his position as curator of the Doderer memorial rooms at the Alsergrund District Museum in Vienna.

Pfeiffer is especially good at showing how broad background influences and "raw" topographical items and places become transmuted into the elements of imaginative writing; time after time, he traces the adjustments Doderer made to create out of his everyday surroundings genuine symbol-bearing places in his novels.

Pfeiffer is the "utility guy"--and I mean this in the very best sense--among the Doderer experts. Never holding an academic appointment, the very model of the private scholar, working for so many years on Doderer out of sheer love, he strips away the inessentials and shows the whole dynamic of Doderer's life, environment, and artistry working together. For that reason, he's also the "go to" guy, the man all the eminent scholars and professors turn to when they need clear information and cogent interpretation.

If you can't read German (would you be looking at this review otherwise?), I recommend you first read Michael Bachem's excellent book on Doderer (Twayne, 1982), then turn to Pfeiffer. His is a deceptively simple book you can't do without, and I think the experts will soon be saying the same.

Let's just hope now that some enterprising publisher will bring out Doderer's other great novel, The Strudlhof Steps, in English. It's already half finished by yours truly.

Read this helpful handbook, meantime, and if you get to Vienna, look up Pfeiffer at the museum, Währinger Stra�e 43, on any Wednesday from 10 AM to noon. He would love to see you!

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.

Following his principle: "La famille c'est moi," Baron Childerich III, by a most bizarre and complicated system of marriages and adoptions, attempts to incorporate in his own person many family positions. He becomes his own grandfather, father, nephew, uncle... In THE MEROVINGIANS, Heimito von Doderer, the most original of noted Austrian authors, created an absorbing roller-coaster story that takes the reader into dimensions of nonsense, character and behavior that s/he has certainly never visited before. It is funny, astonishing, weird, but human and involving.

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"?

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!