Dance Of Death [Paperback]

Strindberg August (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 1976

Drama Classics edition

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Swedish (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

August Strindberg (1849-1912) is best-known for his misogyny and as the author of Miss Julie (1889). His first success came as a novelist and autobiographer. His plays (and he wrote over sixty) were deeply controversial in their time and still are to some extent. They range form bold naturalism (e.g. The father, 1887) to an entralling expressionism (e.g. The Ghost Sonata, 1907).

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. (April 17, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393008207
• ISBN-13: 978-0393008203
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,142,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Web of deception, August 24, 2008

By 

Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dance of Death (Paperback)

It's a pity that Strindberg isn't read much anymore, because his gloomy understanding of human relations, especially between men and women, still has insights to offer. Bergman swore by him, and one could do worse than take Bergman as an acute critic.

"The Dance of Death," which many see as one of Strindberg's best, focuses on the marriage of Edgar and Alice on the eve of its silver anniversary. Edgar is a failed career military officer, a bullying, self-absorbed man who lives for his food and drink and seems to have lost sexual interest in his wife. Alice is a one-time actress convinced (probably falsely) that she gave up a promising career to marry Edgar. Kurt, Alice's cousin who suddenly moves to the remote island where Edgar is stationed, enters the action early on, and is quickly absorbed into the malevolent atmosphere of Edgar and Alice's marriage.

And malevolent it is. Both spouses have fallen into the habit of perpetual deceit, lying to one another about everything so incessantly that they've begun to half-believe their own deceptions. The tissues of lies in which they wrap themselves and one another are both protective insulation and connections: they more they create a false world, the more trapped in it and dependent on one another they become. Alice is perpetually on the point of leaving Edgar. Edgar is perpetually on the point of dying. Both celebrate the potential absence of the other, and both are absolutely terrified of it.

Strindberg, then, presents us with the portrait of two people who despise one another and want to be free, but whose personalities and worldviews are so bound up together that they can't really live apart. The prospect is gloomy, which is perhaps why Strindberg wrote a second part to the play, rarely performed, in which the son of Kurt and the daughter of Alice and Edgar seem to make a fresh start, escaping from the older generation's poisonous atmosphere. But even here, things are ambiguous. The daughter, Judith, is beginning to show definite Edgar-like traits.