Married Life [Paperback]

'We are reminded of Kafka: dreamlike conversations, introspection of a disturbed soul, an orgy of a nervous breakdown. Married Life is a masterpiece, a find.'

'This is an important novel, not only as the historic document that it is, but as a work of literature that echoes both Kafka and Mann.'

'A deeply disturbing novel...To read this novel today, with full awareness of what happened to European Jewry and to Vogel himself, is a wrenching, sobering experience. It deserves a place on the small shelf of cautionary literature about the involuted relationship between torturers and their victims.'

'...the novel has definite historic value as a document of the period, together with a certain ironic charm, not unlike Schnitzler's. Vogel deserves to be read...'

'A gut-wrenching study that combines a Kafkaesque sense of humiliation with precisely-rendered realistic detail - and successfully creates an atmosphere of feverish decay that is as much cultural as personal.'

'Married Life is both extremely beautiful and extremely troubling...It is a great book in the manner of Kafka, a chronicle of horror foretold.'

'Vogel's sense of humour is similar to Kafka's...In the light of events, the novel casts a prophetic shadow all its own.'

'David Vogel belonged to a long tradition of Jewish authors, such as Arthur Schnitzler and Elias Canetti, who wrote about Vienna... Vogel's work must rank among the blackest descriptions of Vienna ever written.'

A rich and powerful novel, with the protagonists and the historical setting vividly depicted, this title holds it's place in the urban novel genre as a modern classic in a strong European tradition. This novel belongs to the urban novel genre, and is set in the Vienna of the 1920's. The tortuous and humiliating marriage of Gurdwell and Thea is evocatively set against the backdrop of a city which had witnessed the collapse of it's Empire in the 1st world war. Social decay in the external environment of the city is mirrored by despair, cruelty, depravity and disintegration within the marriage, narrated in rich and vivid prose.