Richard L. Simon

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Lieutenant Gustl

Richard L. Simon; Arthur Schnitzler

Synopsis:
Originally translated as None But the Brave in 1926, Lieutenant Gustl is one of the great Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler's most acclaimed novels. Written entirely in the form of an interior monologue, the novel recounts the moment-to-moment experiences of a swaggering Austrian military man. In a cloakroom after a concert, Gustl gets into an argument with a baker who, reacting to Gustl's rudeness, grabs his sword and orders him to have a little patience. Convinced he has been completely dishonored, Gustl ponders suicide and wanders through Vienna wishing for the baker's death. When he learns that the baker has, in fact, died that evening from a stroke, he immediately returns to his aggressive and hateful nature, and relishes a duel he had entered into days before. A tour-de-force of modernist point-of-view, Lieutenant Gustl is highly critical of Austria's militarism, and resulted in anti-Semitic attacks on Schnitzler when it was first published in 1901. But Schnitzler's influence was enormous; James Joyce is said to have been influenced by this book in the writing of Ulysses.

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