The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Divertimenti and Variations, by Heimito von Doderer
Reviewed by Joseph Dewey

Trans. Vincent Kling. Counterpath Press, 2008. 246 pp. Paper: $17.95.

There is something magisterial about these fictions, an old school gravitas that so many relentlessly hip contemporary short stories simply lack. These are grand speculations about time and memory that refuse to render tidy themes but rather gift the reader with the responsibilities of expanded awareness, works that weave a wealth of Freudian and Kafkaesque subtleties that upend the parameters of psychological realism. These central characters, wounded by distant traumas and now struggling within a present that appears routine but is one chance recollection away from shattering into tumult, want only to impose order on their lives. That they cannot liberates each from the illusions of identity into the perception of their genuine self. A father must confront the emotional abuse he inflicted on his daughter; a harried commuter indulges an apocalyptic daydream in which his city is reduced to ruins; a Viennese academic, fashionably angst-ridden, brushes against passion, an incendiary love with a coffeehouse waitress whose own deep psychological scarring he cannot begin to fathom. Doderer, among Austria’s most acclaimed post-war writers and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize until his death in 1966, conjures the elasticity of time in rhapsodic prose that demands to be read aloud. That sonic effect is part of Doderer’s fascination with music itself, each tale structured around the dynamics of musical forms, experiments that recall Joycean modernism (the stories date from Doderer’s early years). Subtly, Doderer creates musical effects without insisting on them: repetition and reprise, motif, contrapuntal narratives, staccato dialogue-recitatives set amid lavish poetic interludes. Such musical effects never insist on their presence but rather provide the very structure and order that the characters themselves so desperately seek. Thus, like the complex fractal experiments of Schoenberg, Doderer uses the logic of musical forms to at once assert and make ironic the concept of harmony.