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Title: Dream Story (Green Integer, 96) by Arthur Schnitzler, Otto P. Schinnerer ISBN: 1-931243-48-4 Publisher: Green Integer Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.85 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Dream Story: A study in the relation of dreams to reality
Comment: Arthur Schnitzler's "Dream Story", is a psychological novel which explores the relation of dreams and fantasies to reality. The principle characters, Fridolin and Albertina, are a happily married couple who confess their sexual might-have -beens to one another. However, whether or not the events are reality or merely dreams is not known. The book puts it this way, "no dream is entirely a dream." This book was optioned by film director Stanley Kubrick, director of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "A Clockwork Orange", and is being filmed under the title, "Eyes Wide Shut". Kubrick described the book this way, "It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the inportance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality."
Rating: 1
Summary: Good writing, but too badly finished off to be worth reading
Comment: Arthur Schnitzler - "Dream Story" (1926)
A potentially interesting book, about the period of just a day in one man's life - but lacking any sufficient ending to do justice to the material, and ending up as a mere fragment.
At the end, a prostitute is in hospital but we are not told why; a secret meeting took place, but its function is never explained; a woman acting as a saviour at the secret function may have been killed or may not have been, but we are not told more about her fate; an old piano-playing friend goes missing but we are left in the dark as to what happened to him after that. Why raise these questions in the reader's mind, then just drift the plot off into nothing? What was the point of the thing?
The quality of writing, as expression, is good, but the book fails to go anywhere sufficiently significant and conclusive by the end to have justified taking the reader on the journey there. The reader is let down at the end, being given only half a story and a lot of straggly ends that drift off to nothing, creating a feeling of dissatisfaction. The book posed too many questions but then failed to answer them and was only half a book, cheating the reader out of a story worth reading.
1 star out of 5
Rating: 1
Summary: An outdated novella of Freudian symbolism
Comment: Published in 1926, Arthur Schnitzler's DREAM STORY ("Traumnovelle") is a novella of dark Freudian images and plays on the merging of the conscious and subconscious in human life. Forgotten for several decades, it has returned to print with Stanley Kubrick's last film EYES WIDE SHUT, which was a somewhat faithful adaptation set in the present day. DREAM STORY tells of a married couple in Vienna, perhaps at the turn of the 20th century though the date is unspecified. While having what begins as a friendly conversation one evening, Albertine confesses to her physician husband Fridolin that during a vacation in Denmark the previous summer she felt she could leave him and their daughter behind for a handsome naval officer who was staying in the same hotel. Fridolin, shocked that his marriage isn't terribly stable and that his wife could maliciously leave him, is then called to visit a patient. From there he encounters several women in his journeys through Vienna and eventually gains entrance to a upper-class orgy (presented somewhat differently than the black mass of Kubrick's film). The action takes place over only two days, and this slim volume can be read in a mere two hours. I can't comment on this translation, having read the translation into Esperanto by Michel Duc Goninaz, but the novel's meaning is based on symbolism that wouldn't lose much in translation, though one must be aware that the German names of the characters (and the Schreyvogelgasse, a Viennese street) are linked. People owning a German dictionary will get a little more out of this novella.
Arthur Schnitzler was quite enamoured by the theories of Sigmund Freud, so much so that Freud joked that he would never meet the novelist because of the belief that one would die upon encountering his double. DREAM STORY is full of allusions to Freudian psychology, and the orgy is both a real event and a representation of Fridolin's subconscious. Albertine's dream recounted to Fridolin afterwards, told in unrealistic detail that shows Schnitzler is trying too hard for a roman a clef, echoes the previous action eerily and hence the title of the novella. It is because of its Freudian basis that DREAM STORY is ultimately disappointing. Freudian psychology has been taken some heavy blows in favour of the theories of Jung and Lacan, so this story shows its age. And while it would seem at first that Schnitzler is being progressive in saying that women do indeed think of sexuality, it is apparent that Schnitzler believes that women unhealthily desire sex only as a tool to hurt and strike out, as Albertine insinuates several times that she would take great pleasure in abandoning Fridolin for a purely physical relationship with a younger man. As a result of this basis, DREAM STORY is quite out of date and misogynist.
I really couldn't recommend DREAM STORY, unless one has an interest in Freudian psychology and its application, in which case this novella is a treasure of the thought of the period. While recommending the movie over the book is a reversal of the usual order of things, I'd recommend simply watching EYES WIDE SHUT. Stanley Kubrick was aware of many of the flaws of the source material and fixed a few of them, and the art direction and cinematography are superb. The novella doesn't have much going for it.
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Title: Eyes Wide Shut by Arthur Schnitzler ISBN: 2266097016 Publisher: Pocket (FR) Pub. Date: July, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Night Games: And Other Stories and Novellas by Arthur Schnitzler, Margret Schaefer ISBN: 1566635063 Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Hands Around: A Cycle of Ten Dialogues (Dover Thrift Editions) by Arthur Schnitzler ISBN: 0486287246 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $1.00 |
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Title: Eyes Wide Shut by Michel Chion, Trista Selous ISBN: 085170932X Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: 07 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd ISBN: 0226467627 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.93 |
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