Desire and Delusion: Three Novellas

"Life," Arthur Schnitzler famously said, "is what happens between love and death." This second collection of Schnitzler's prose fiction follows on Night Games, Margret Schaefer's earlier translation of the Viennese writer's tales, which won acclaim in the New Yorker and among critics generally. In Desire and Delusion, Ms. Schaefer has translated three of Schnitzler's greatest novellas―Dying, Flight into Darkness, and Fräulein Else. They reveal the depths of his psychological and moral understanding of life as well as the masterful storytelling techniques that immerse the reader into the very center of his characters' thoughts and emotions. Acknowledged masterpieces all, these novellas span Schnitzler's entire career from 1895 to 1931. They testify to his stature as depth psychologist, a doctor-writer fascinated by illness and very much at home in what Susan Sontag has called "the country of the sick." In all these novellas, Schnitzler uses point of view, interior monologue, and stream of consciousness in a radically modern way reminiscent of Joyce and Proust, only earlier.