The Demons: Part Three

by Heimito von Doderer, Richard Winston (Translator), Clara Winston (Translator)

Heimito von Doderer was one of the twentieth century's most distinguished Austrian novelists. His finest novel is The Demons, a monumental work and itself the 'Götterdämmerung' as it were to earlier novels. The central preoccupation of this masterpiece is the decline of European civilization. He began work on it in 1931, after reading Dostoyevsky's The Devils. Symphonic in construction, it is a panoramic re-creation of Viennese society in all its strata, conjuring the depths as well as the heights of everything we might think of as Vienna. Doderer has Balzacian scope as well as owing much to Proust and Musil. His human comedy is drawn with a humour as vital when ironic as when satirical, and his baroque imagination is well served by his tireless linguistic ingenuity.

Genres: Fiction

484 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Heimito von Doderer lebte fast ausschließlich in Wien. 1916 geriet er in russische Gefangenschaft und kehrte erst 1920 zurück. Er studierte Geschichtswissenschaft. Seit der Veröffentlichung seiner Hauptwerke "Die Strudlhofstiege" (1951) und "Die Dämonen" (1956) gilt er als einer der bedeutendsten österreichischen Schriftsteller.

Reviews

[Jonathan yates · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was awesome, a pretty classic example of a book of ideas we have a really long and complicated book which seems to be written in two stages, the first 700 pages are a pretty gentle story of prewar austria, a lot of ideas and distance from what is happening at that time are expressed and then the rest is written following world war II, mr Doderer was a nazi and he's trying to express something and his style and attitudes had changed, the second part of the book was much better than the first, the second part had a lot of different styles going on, a lot of experimental parts and also he took a lot of insight from Virginia Woolf in his descriptions of people and events and i think it's cool. He uses the 1300 pages to try and describe something that happened to him, its certainly his life's work and i'd definitely read it again and recommend it! not for casual reading though, its got 40 characters some with multiple names
boo on that

[James]

I'm rereading this amazing huge novel of Vienna in the twenties: von Doderer is probably as good as Robert Musil [The Man Without Qualities:] and Proust. His quality of attention to the psychology of everyday is intense and impressive.