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3.0 von 5 Sternen
Psychoanalytical propaganda., 20. Juli 1999
Von Ein Kunde
Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story is little more than unquestioning propaganda for psychoanalysis. A smug doctor, Fridolin, having learnt of his wife's past yearnings and oneiric infidelities, is thrown into a dark night of the soul (yep, as cliched as it sounds), wherein he encounters paedophiles, Bohemian pianists, top-hatted coachmen of Death, Freemason-like masked orgies and sacrificial 'nuns'. At this point, the doctor's passivity (which presumably represents his unthinking acceptance of a rotten social order. Yawn.) turns into activity, as the novel becomes a detective story. Finally, although this plot is (innovatively) unresolved, the adventure/'dream', and, most importantly, his confessing of it (like a patient to a shrink) to his spouse, leads to a greater humanity and perception in Fridolin, a more mature understanding of his wife and marriage. Unbelievably, the nightmare of the novel becomes a bright new dawn. Either Schnitzler was strikingly naive, or his irony is very laboured. The strange thing is that the material has so much promise - the fundamental variations on love and death; the formal ambiguity; the dream/reality twilight of Fridolin's adventures; Albertine's vivid dreams; the labyrinthine set-pieces; the presentation of out-of-time Vienna as a ghost town; the possibility that all the haunting women Fridolin meets could be his wife (Albertine disparu?); the frustrating roundelay of unfulfilled adventures - but Schnitzler's writing is just not up to it. Maybe it's a bad translation, but its dreams are too mundane, and the everyday isn't eerie enough. There is none of the submerged terror a Poe, Kafka or Borges might have brought to it, or the difficult eroticism of a Nabokov. In the end this novel (really a long short story) is too clinical, too much like a medical thesis, to make its characters or nightmares haunt the mind. Frederic Raphael's introduction enriches the novel, especially its powerfully tacit engagement with contemporary anti-Semitism, but it doesn't improve its writing. To be honest, like most people, I only read the novel because of Kubrick, and any pleasure I got in reading it (which was frequently considerable) was in imagining how he would transform this material into another masterpiece. How did Ophuls manage to create two genuine works of genius from this mediocrity's oeuvre? Kubrick IS up to the material - the film should be terrifying and erotic. (Incidentally, by sheer coincidence, the last book I read was Lolita, also filmed by Kubrick. The two books couldn't be more different in style, content, intent, entertainment value, profundity, ambiguity, but especially in transformative effect on the reader (Nabokov once called Freudian psychology a 'police state'). What has our hero found Kubrickian in these antitheses? In both, a civilised man finds his values irreplaceably shaken by his confrontation with a socially 'perverse' sexuality. However, the ending of Dream Story is strangely optimistic for the tempermentally pessimistic Kubrick - I'm intrigued to see how he handles it (not being American, I have to wait until Autumn)).
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5.0 von 5 Sternen
Mesmerising! "Freud" at his best, 20. Juli 1999
Von Ein Kunde
Although the Amazon review guidelines prohibit profanity and obscenities, this book is full of these though in a rather genteel language of the fin-de-siecle Vienna. This is a sort of Freud at his best. I found the Japanese translation at my local library nine years ago and found it so mesmerising that I even went so far as to buy the complete works of Arthur Schnitzler in the original German at an antiquarian bookshop. However, to my dismay, as the edition was published in the early 1920s (before the author's death), it does not contain this "Traumnovelle" or "Flucht in die Finsternis" ("Flight into the Darkness"), which were published later. I'm very much looking forward to seeing Kubrick's last film (due to be released here on July 31st), but I'm still wondering if it will really come up to the standard set by the author. I'm going to buy the English translation to enjoy it once again.
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4.0 von 5 Sternen
Made me curious what Kubrick has up his sleeve., 6. Juli 1999
This brief read provided interesting insight into Stanley Kubrick. After reading this, only a genius filmaker would dare to dream that this could be made into a film. Can't wait to see the movie and how he adapted this bizarre short story.
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