Customer Reviews

Dream Story (Green Integer)

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Arthur Schnitzler's "Dream Story", is a psychological novel which explores the relation of dreams and fantasies to reality. The principle characters, Fridolin and Albertina, are a happily married couple who confess their sexual might-have -beens to one another. However, whether or not the events are reality or merely dreams is not known. The book puts it this way, "no dream is entirely a dream." This book was optioned by film director Stanley Kubrick, director of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "A Clockwork Orange", and is being filmed under the title, "Eyes Wide Shut". Kubrick described the book this way, "It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the inportance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality."

In a short novel of one-hundred pages length set after the turn of the twentieth century Arthur Schnitzler, the contemporary of Sigmund Freud, elegantly poses an implicit question. Are life, intentions and consciousness what they seem and would it matter were one's motives other than their outcome?
Dream Story came to me in the reverse order to what is typical. Having seen the film by Stanley Kubrick the masterful direction and intriguing premise acted as impetus for seeking out the book from which the former was adapted. Never mind that Kubrick is unlikely to be bettered; such was the quality of the film, Eyes Wide Shut. Moreover, it was unlikely that Kubrick would pick anything less than a winning novel as his outline to work on.
In twenty four hours the realities of a physician used to dealing with the corporeal and physical is altered once faced with the surprise, trauma and discovery of puzzling and nefarious happenings not oordinarily out in the open. Apparently, nothing is what it seems and reckoning only yields more questions. Forced to avert his eyes from the facade, the charlatans and the masquerade because of his emotions and coercion from a secret society Fridolin, the protagonist, comes to believe that what is most grounded in reality is something one cannot touch, namely feeling, emotions and intentions. Temptation might carry the battle, but the war is won by honesty, bonds of relationship and trust in the hidden motive.
Ultimately, as Fridolin and his wife Albertine concur, trusting in original intent surmounts momentary lapses or deviations from that essence. It is a lesson worth pondering.

As a longtime fan of Stanley Kubrick, I looked forward to the movie "Eyes Wide Shut." I read a bit about Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story that serves as the basis for the film. I decided to read the novella before I saw the film. The novella has its moments, but it wasn't up to the high expectations I had for it.

Dream Story concerns a young Viennese physician, Fridolin, who is drawn into a world of prostitution, violence, pedophilia, orgies, and murder. After his walk on the wild side, Fridolin returns home where his wife confesses that she has had a dream in which he was crucified. He perceives her dream as a form of emotional infidelity and journeys back into the Vienna underworld. Freud's ideas heavily influence Schnitzler's novella, which comes as no surprise given Schnitzler's background.

Schnitzler does a nice job of creating an eerie, grayish, otherworldly Vienna. The scenes in which Fridolin wanders Vienna at night are especially strong. Schnitzler writing is also strong when it depicts the confusion that Fridolian experiences when his well-controlled world crumbles as his desires awaken.

My main complaint about Dream Story is that it is a novella with a beginning and a middle, but not an ending. Schnitzler leads his reader down an interesting path, but there is no resolution. After reading Dream Story, I was reminded of John Gardner's admonition that a novel must have some definite ending - the hero can win or be defeated; the "slice of life" novel that resolves nothing, however, is always a letdown. Sadly, this is the case with Dream Story.

This isn't a bad novella, but I won't seek out any more of Schnitzler's work.

»Traumnovelle« is the book on which the fantastic movie »Eyes Wide Shut« is based. It is written as early as in 1926, and it does not take place in New York but in Vienna.

A VERY beautifully written short story which is much more a poetic dream journey than an erotic story. Very interesting book!

Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story is little more than unquestioning propaganda for psychoanalysis. A smug doctor, Fridolin, having learnt of his wife's past yearnings and oneiric infidelities, is thrown into a dark night of the soul (yep, as cliched as it sounds), wherein he encounters paedophiles, Bohemian pianists, top-hatted coachmen of Death, Freemason-like masked orgies and sacrificial 'nuns'. At this point, the doctor's passivity (which presumably represents his unthinking acceptance of a rotten social order. Yawn.) turns into activity, as the novel becomes a detective story. Finally, although this plot is (innovatively) unresolved, the adventure/'dream', and, most importantly, his confessing of it (like a patient to a shrink) to his spouse, leads to a greater humanity and perception in Fridolin, a more mature understanding of his wife and marriage. Unbelievably, the nightmare of the novel becomes a bright new dawn. Either Schnitzler was strikingly naive, or his irony is very laboured. The strange thing is that the material has so much promise - the fundamental variations on love and death; the formal ambiguity; the dream/reality twilight of Fridolin's adventures; Albertine's vivid dreams; the labyrinthine set-pieces; the presentation of out-of-time Vienna as a ghost town; the possibility that all the haunting women Fridolin meets could be his wife (Albertine disparu?); the frustrating roundelay of unfulfilled adventures - but Schnitzler's writing is just not up to it. Maybe it's a bad translation, but its dreams are too mundane, and the everyday isn't eerie enough. There is none of the submerged terror a Poe, Kafka or Borges might have brought to it, or the difficult eroticism of a Nabokov. In the end this novel (really a long short story) is too clinical, too much like a medical thesis, to make its characters or nightmares haunt the mind. Frederic Raphael's introduction enriches the novel, especially its powerfully tacit engagement with contemporary anti-Semitism, but it doesn't improve its writing. To be honest, like most people, I only read the novel because of Kubrick, and any pleasure I got in reading it (which was frequently considerable) was in imagining how he would transform this material into another masterpiece. How did Ophuls manage to create two genuine works of genius from this mediocrity's oeuvre? Kubrick IS up to the material - the film should be terrifying and erotic. (Incidentally, by sheer coincidence, the last book I read was Lolita, also filmed by Kubrick. The two books couldn't be more different in style, content, intent, entertainment value, profundity, ambiguity, but especially in transformative effect on the reader (Nabokov once called Freudian psychology a 'police state'). What has our hero found Kubrickian in these antitheses? In both, a civilised man finds his values irreplaceably shaken by his confrontation with a socially 'perverse' sexuality. However, the ending of Dream Story is strangely optimistic for the tempermentally pessimistic Kubrick - I'm intrigued to see how he handles it (not being American, I have to wait until Autumn)).

It may be odd to cite a source work for its value as a companion to the film made from it, but I suspect that few contemporary readers would otherwise have an interest in Schnitzler's Mittel-European novela. On the other hand, for Kubrick aficionados, particularly those who admire "Eyes Wide Shut," it is fascinating to compare the book to the film, and that makes the book indispensable. Other reviewers have here commented upon Kubrick's decision to omit the references to anti-Semitism in "Dream Story," and it makes all those Christmas trees in the film even more interesting. The term "Kafkaesque" will come up in the mind of the reader of this work and serve to deepen our understanding of the extent to which Kubrick's entire opus can be said to be an examination of the dream realms.

Originally published in 1926, Dream Story (Traumnovelle) was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's final film, 1999's Eyes Wide Shut. The premise is simple enough: Following a masquerade ball, Albertina confides in her husband, Fridolin, the lust she felt for Danish sailor she encountered on a previous vacation. Still digesting this bubble-bursting confession, he is called away because one of his patients, a Councilor, has suffered a heart attack. By the time Fridolin arrives, the Councilor has died. Rather than return home, less inviting with each passing moment of reflection, Fridolin goes out in the middle of the night.

The whole publication runs 143 pages in a book that measures 6" x 4.3" and has margins that measure an inch or more. The benefit of this brevity is that the story can easily be read in one setting, and it was certainly intended for that purpose. Not only does this lend itself to a quick nighttime reading, but multiple readings. How much of the story is real, and how much is imagined? That's just the first question left for the reader. Schnitzler delves into the subject of sexuality--from lust to revulsion; trust to jealousy; intimacy to baseness. Because the story is so brief, and its pace so sharp, there is a large sense of urgency lent to these ponderings. This is not soft erotica, but rather a sociological examination.

If there is a knock on how this story has aged, it is in the dialogue. Statements made betwixt characters are often of the stilted, "In the future let's always tell each other such things at once" variety. The narration, though, is very absorbing and flows so perfectly that the length of the paragraphs--many of which consume nearly an entire page--scarcely registers even in the mind's eye.

I sincerely wish I had read this story--or, ideally, in the original German, were I capable of comprehending it--prior to seeing Eyes Wide Shut. I kept recalling the film version of specific scenes whilst reading, and futilely trying to use one version to analyze the other. Furthermore, of course, I kept picturing the imagery of Kubrick's film which would certainly have been disappointing had that film not been so visually striking.

Younger readers will identify more with the story's curiosity and lust; older readers, who've built deeper relationships will be struck by Fridolin's sense of betrayal by Albertina. This is perhaps what makes this so brilliant a story--at every stage of a reader's relationship, there is some angle of Dream Story likely to resonate strongly.

With a $12.95 cover price, though, it's very hard to outright recommend Dream Story as a new purchase. I happened to have some rewards points accumulated that I redeemed for Borders Bucks, so I didn't actually pay for my copy. I would advise curious readers to seek this out via their local library, or failing that to hunt for it used. And, if you've not yet seen EWS, read the original story beforehand.

`Dream Story' is now a famous novella on account of Kubrick's mediocre film `Eyes Wide Shut,' but it remains a fabulous literary exploration of infidelity and the Freudian conceptualization of Eros. After over eighty years, Schnitzler's prose remains fresh and mysterious like a cold, damp Viennese alley. It is the story of a young couple's adventures in infidelity both real and of the unconscious. After a jealous fight, the protagonist leaves his home and wife and wanders the deep recesses of Vienna in search of sexual gratitude and revenge. He encounters a lonely widow, the young promiscuous daughter of a shop owner, and religious orgy. He returns and his wife reveals dreams of infidelity and betrayal. Schnitzler is probing the darker and more painful dimensions of human sexuality, the fact of Eros, the fact of desire, both real and imagined. After a moment of reconciliation the bourgeois home has come full circle; `Dream Story' is brilliant in its ability to be both conventional and provocative. It is a wonderful novella of intrigue, sexuality, and love.

Although the Amazon review guidelines prohibit profanity and obscenities, this book is full of these though in a rather genteel language of the fin-de-siecle Vienna. This is a sort of Freud at his best. I found the Japanese translation at my local library nine years ago and found it so mesmerising that I even went so far as to buy the complete works of Arthur Schnitzler in the original German at an antiquarian bookshop. However, to my dismay, as the edition was published in the early 1920s (before the author's death), it does not contain this "Traumnovelle" or "Flucht in die Finsternis" ("Flight into the Darkness"), which were published later. I'm very much looking forward to seeing Kubrick's last film (due to be released here on July 31st), but I'm still wondering if it will really come up to the standard set by the author. I'm going to buy the English translation to enjoy it once again.

This book was in good shape with just some writing in it. It turns out Eyes Wide Shut was quite close to the book, mostly just a different time period among other differences.