Arrogance [Paperback]

Joanna Scott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1991

In Joanna Scott's breakthrough novel the Austrian artist Egon Schiele comes to prismatic life in a narrative that defies convention, history, and identity. A self-professed genius and student of August Klimt, Scott's Schiele repeatedly challenges the boundaries of early twentieth-century Europe. Thrown in jail on charges of immorality, Schiele's Mephistophelean reputation only grows in stature until at the age of twenty-eight, the artist dies in the Great Flu Pandemic. Told from a crosscurrent of voices, viewpoints and times, this stunning novel won Scott a nomination for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Based on the short and troubled life of expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), Scott's ambitious novel examines the artistic imperative and its obsessive nature, the power of social conventions and fabric of life in Vienna at the turn of the century. Weaving her story around Schiele's 24-day stay in a village jail on charges of seducing the young girls who modeled for his unrestrained sketches, Scott ( Fading , My Parmacheneok Belle ) develops assorted narrative threads. The strongest of these tell of Vallie Neuzil, Schiele's sweets-loving, uninhibited mistress whom he abandons to marry the conventional Edith Harms, and, in first-person, of one of the girls from the village, whose life and memories continue nearly to the present. Scott's intricate approach to her subject(s) is fully imagined and authoritatively handled, yet the novel is finally cool and somehow hollow, more like an innovative treatise on impulse, pain and love than a story of flesh-and-blood people whose suffering and triumphs matter.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Based on the life of Expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), this brilliant new novel by the author of The Closest Possible Union ( LJ 4/1/88) moves forward and backward in time as it circles around one pivotal incident: the artist's imprisonment in 1912 on charges of seduction and corrupting minors. Diverse narrative voices and shifting chronological perspectives create a potentially confusing structure; yet this story is so intriguing, and Scott's richly textured style so mesmerizing, that one is completely captivated. Like Schiele himself, who is "a victim to his senses, forced to inhale, ingest, absorb the world," and like the teenage girl involved in the false seduction charge who cannot stay away from the artist's cottage, the reader too becomes something of a voyeur, lured by the rich descriptions of turn-of-the-century Vienna and the dark nuances of Schiele's voracious imagination. A dazzling, disturbing collage of a novel.
- Elise Chase, Forbes Lib., Northampton, Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 1 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (August 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393307921
• ISBN-13: 978-0393307924
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,416,434 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extremely well-wrought piece of art about art., June 11, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Arrogance (Paperback)

With one of the better, and more original, voices in contemporary fiction Joanna Scott has created a startlingly beautiful view into the artistic process. Through the lenses of several people (including his own)we get a full picture of the painter Egon Schiele and of those around him. You can taste the food, feel the paint on the canvas, and smell early twentieth-century Vienna! There are few writers today who can write with the grace and power that flows through Joanna Scott's prose. She is a writer who commands attention, and deserves to be widely read. If you enjoy art, traveling, food, or amazing writing you should read this novel. In fact, you should ingest everything that she has written, and then pass it on to others! ARROGANCE is a great place to start- it is phenomenal, it is beautiful, in short: it is a must

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A well done story but is it Egon Schiele?, July 18, 2000

By 

C. L. Wilson (Darnestown, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Arrogance (Paperback)

I bought this book more because my artistic interest in Egon Schiele than as an interesting fictional work. The book is well done as fiction but seems to get a significant part of the art wrong. Biographies of Schiele usually give his wife Edith a very different character. In the book, she is very proper. In most collections of his work, many of the most explicit and erotic drawings are listed as of Edith and her sister. Also,the relationship to his sister seems very much more restrained than than his work seems to indicate. Discussion of paintings and drawings without examples made me happy to have the Schroder biograpby of Schiele handy for comparison.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Vivid Parallax Narrative of Egon Schiele's Life and Art, December 28, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Arrogance (Paperback)

Egon Schiele lived a brief and turbulent artistic life, dying of influenza in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight. Schiele was a draftsman and printmaker, but was best known as a painter. He entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at the tender age of sixteen and soon became a student of August Klimt, the most well known Austrian painter of that time. As one of the preeminent artists associated with Austrian expressionism, Schiele's paintings are transgressive depictions of contorted, erotically charged nude figures, often in provocative sexual poses and often including young girls. Not surprisingly, Schiele's art was controversial. Moreover, his use of adolescent girls as models for his drawings and paintings led to numerous charges of immorality. Often, this simply meant he had to move from one small Austrian town to another, hounded by the wrath of common people who viewed him as morally repugnant. However, in one case, Schiele was prosecuted and spent time in prison for his averred transgressions.

"Arrogance" is Joanna Scott's fictional account of Schiele's life, a parallax narrative that tells its tale from a series of changing and different perspectives. Nominated for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award (which, regrettably, it did not win), it subsequently earned Scott a MacArthur Fellowship for her presumed literary genius. While not a novel for readers who prefer straightforward, linear narratives, "Arrogance" is nonetheless a penetrating fictional exploration of Schiele's artistic genius as related not only from the facts of his life, but also from the imaginary inner world of the artist and those around him, including his long-time female companion, Vallie Neuzil, and a fictional female narrator who tells of her fascination and involvement with Schiele and Vallie during their residence in the small Austrian village of Neulengbach, where Schiele was arrested for corruption of minors.

"Arrogance" is a vivid and convincing portrait of the life and mind of the artist, a complex narrative that challenge the reader to understand and interpret that life from multiple perspectives, both biographical and imaginative. It is, in short, a brilliant example of how fiction and imagination can inform biography, how literature can be written to illuminate and inform the real.