Strudlhof Steps

The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the twentieth-century, a novel crowded with characters, from the elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat through the innocent ingenue through "respectable," narrow shopkeepers through sexual adventurers, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk, in which the greatest character is the city itself.

But perhaps the main character is the ubiquitous narrator, a tireless companion by turns exuberant, hilarious, and lyrical. He relishes the drollery and irony of shifting registers, so that the telling itself, rich in asides and word plays, emerges as a major effect, as in all great comedy.

Doderer depicts Vienna and its surrounding hills and woods with all the vividness of Joyce's Dublin or D blin's Berlin. This panorama is brought to a central focus through the outdoor staircase of the title, a triumph of engineering and architecture from which radiate energy, form, and mythic significance. By linking two interwoven time periods, 1908-1911 and 1923-1925, it stands as an emblem in stone of the novel's subtitle, The Depth of the Years.

The Strudlhof Steps is also deliberately constructed as a "good read" with suspense elements and surprise twists, though patience is needed to follow the seemingly scatterbrained narrator's leaps and digressions. The conventional story elements encompass crime and romance, heartbreak and happiness, treachery and fidelity, but the novel is also palatably experimental, announcing the climatic action in the first sentence, for example.

A novelist's novel, beloved by many writers for its craft, but also an affectionately treasured popular success.

The first English translation of an essential Austrian novel about life in early-twentieth-century Vienna, as seen through a wide and varied cast of characters.

The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the early twentieth century, a vast novel crowded with characters ranging from an elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat to an innocent ingenue to "respectable" shopkeepers and tireless sexual adventurers, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk. The greatest character in the book, however, is Vienna, which Heimito von Doderer renders as distinctly as James Joyce does Dublin or Alfred D blin does Berlin. Interweaving two time periods, 1908 to 1911 and 1923 to 1925, the novel takes the monumental eponymous outdoor double staircase as a governing metaphor for its characters' intersecting and diverging fates. The Strudlhof Steps is an experimental tour de force with the suspense and surprise of a soap opera. Here Doderer illuminates the darkness of passing years with the dazzling extravagance that is uniquely his.