The Sleepwalkers 1st Vintage International ed Edition

by Hermann Broch (Author)

13 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0679764069

ISBN-10: 0679764062

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"Broch performs with an impeccable virtuosity." --Aldous Huxley

With his epic trilogy, Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher equivalent of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss.

Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer (The Romantic), a disgruntled bookkeeper and would-be assassin (The Anarchist), or an opportunistic war-deserter (The Realist), Broch immerses himself in the twists of his characters’ psyches, and at the same time soars above them, to produce a prophetic portrait of a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals, and reason.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Spanning some 20 years, Broch's epic trilogy of daily life in Germany established him as an important modernist innovator.

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"The Sleepwalkers bear[s] witness to Broch's possession of something more than acute psychological insight, something other and much rared than a gift for storytelling. Reading them, we are haunted by the strange and disquieting feeling that we are at the very limits of the expressible. . . . Broch performs with an impeccable virtuosity." --Aldous Huxley

"One of the greatest European novels," --Milan Kundera

"One of the few really great original and thoughtful novels of this century." --Stephen Spender

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Product details

Paperback: 656 pages
Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage International ed edition (January 30, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679764062
ISBN-13: 978-0679764069
Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.4 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 13 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #179,391 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #153 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > European > German
- #326 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical > Jewish
- #484 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Metaphysical & Visionary

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michael jenning

Dreaming The Way To A Nightmare

August 2, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Actually three novels in one, each portraying a seminal period in German history that ends with the rise of the Nazi's. When he's on his game, Broch deserves to be in the company of 20th Century European greats like Musil and Joyce. He writes at a profoundly deep level in the first novel, "The Romantic," and the immersion in character provides a dreamlike quality to the action. "The Anarchist" is coarser, and its protagonist's self-deceptions are fascinating, if appalling. "The Realist" I had difficulty with only because the author intrudes at various points with essays and analysis, which while often brilliant, break the narrative's spell. I realize this is something of a convention in European novels, and I plead a deficient sensibility, since the writing is usually first-rate. One notion of Broch's which haunts me, because it seems so appropriate to our own times: "when the secular rules, romanticism is the unavoidable result," or something to that effect. Thanks to the visual media, video games, etc., we've certainly no shortage of romanticism.

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Vaughan Otter

Morality Meets Relativity

February 5, 2010

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The Sleepwalkers is a loosely connected trilogy of novels completed by Hermann Broch in 1931. Individual titles are The Romantic (1888), The Anarchist (1903), and The Realist (1918). Broch studies the psychological and social forces acting among men and women - artists, performers, intellectuals, labor organizers, beaurocrats, soldiers, merchants and shopowners - whose lives entangle in turn-of-the-century Germany.

In The Romantic (1888), a young military officer crosses paths with a rising businessman in the vibrant complex of urban Berlin, as they become common rivals for status and female attention. While Major von Pasenow fusses over matters of custom and propriety in courtship, his regimental ways appear in contrast to Bertrand, the civilian with a more decadent and philosophical attitude to society and romance.

In The Anarchist (1903) Bertrand has become a powerful "capitalist" in Mannheim, facing opposition from a conscientious accountant seeking to avenge the imprisonment of a friend and labor activist. As Esch gains the advantage, Bertrand clings to his philosophical musing as his sexual appetites move to the foreground in a confrontation with moral and tragic significance. The Anarchist concludes, about half-way through the book, with the accountant Esch marrying an inn-keeper and taking her to Luxembourg.

At this point, after digesting a heavy diet of dreary social incidents, the reader may be feeling impressed but a little fatigued and weary of humorless conflict. Broch's characters may seem not much more than profiles in anxiety, confronted with the fragility of their survival, but they are detailed by a writer with a magnificent ability to ride the interface between internal consciousness and external events on a high philosophical level.

With The Realist (1918), we find Broch expanding and dividing his scope, a stylistic change that offers some relief from the congested format that came before, and allows Broch more perspective and digression. Following Hugenau, an Alsatian war deserter, we arrive at a German wine valley near the battle-front, now inhabited by Esch and his wife, publishers of a local newspaper, and von Pasenow who is the aging Town Commandant. Arriving in the midst of warfare, escaping his past and inventing his future, Hugenau brings fraud and ruin to Esch and his associates in the community.

While we see the tragedy of war unfold through the eyes of local citizens, Broch inserts a series of essays on Hugenau, entitled "The Disintegration of Values", composed by an author who refers to himself as Bertrand, now acting as an adjunct narrator of events. Bertrand might appear to represent the views of the author, but I have my doubts about that. While Hugenau is clearly a monster, he is also a survivor, and given Bertrand's role in The Anarchist, his philosophical loftiness has, for me, some of the condescension of an elitist, though perhaps a reformed one.

Modern readers may feel this chronicle resonating with familiar trends in society today. Broch deftly probes his human interiors, and his observations are resolved and rendered with imagination. But there is little optimism to be found as Broch dwells on the limitations, blunders and self-destructive ways of his characters, as they plant their individual seeds in a rotting garden of ignorance, decadence, lost opportunity, and failure.

The translation leaves plenty to wish for, as the Muirs rely heavily on British colloquial forms of speech, and occasionally the rendering of certain passages seems awkward and belabored.

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October 6, 2008

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Since I enjoyed Canetti's Auto da Fe so much and am still working my way through Musil's Man without Qualities, Amazon was insistent that I try this novel. The first part (The Romantic) was slow going at first but by the end I was hooked. The second part (The Idealist) also held my interest in its main character. The last part (The Realist)was readable in parts, especially when the capitalist and swine Hugenau was on stage. Nevertheless, there were too many parts of the third book that seemed utterly boring and needlessly obscure and philosophical. The poems interspersed did not help either.

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starker thug pluggers

The author pictures life at the time of his birth and then spirals into wild alternatives

February 11, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The mentality of spiriferous doom is astounding as a theme in which generations follow each other in being unhappy at what is going on. I have been finding the depth of European intellectual history much more exciting than contemporary American fiction. The social life of women who might become the wasted time in American rock and roll songs drift like Elvin Bishop singing: she's yours, she's mine, she's somebody else's too. The main character in the first third of this trilogy, set in 1888, had been in the military because his brother would inherit the family estate, but the older brother got himself killed in a duel that was a matter of family honor or he was unhappy living at home, so roles fall differently in a society in which drama and business seem like ways to think freely.

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Most recent customer reviews

SECOND-HAND BUYERS BEWARE of very different books with the same title

SECOND-HAND "The Sleepwalkers" BUYERS BEWARE lest you set out (as I did) to purchase Christopher Clark’s history of how Europe slouched into war in 1914, or the trilogy of...Read more

Published 4 months ago

Peter Green

Forget It!

Turgid, bleak, pretentious, badly written and badly translated.

Try von Doderer's "The Demons" instead.

Published on December 12, 2014

Kindle Customer

fiction by the wayside

I had great hopes for this book: I love almost everything published by Vintage, and I'm a sucker for dead male writers (preferably Russian) and anything hinting at surreal or...Read more

Published on September 30, 2010

Carol L. Emory

A complex novel worth study and thought

I could not have finished The Sleepwalkers without the able assistance of Amazon reviewers. I assumed that this would be a novel similar to Embers or The Radetzky March.Read more

Published on April 13, 2008

Brad McCormick

A historical fact about this book....

I wrote the first review here of _The Sleepwalkers_.
Since a subsequent reviewer has mentioned Broch's "political activities", perhaps it is relevant here to quote...Read more

Published on May 4, 2001

Amazon Customer

Trilogy of the Disintergration of Values

Broch's Trilogy is the chronicle of the evolution of Germany in particular and the whole Europe in general between the years 1888 and 1918.Read more

Published on December 26, 2000

Esther Nebenzahl

The Absolute Novel?

Born in Vienna in 1886, Broch is considered one of the great names of 20th Century German literature.Read more

Published on November 14, 2000

Mark Bourne

One of the best modern books written

Sleepwalkers has shaped up to be one of my most favorite books of all time. Broch acutely depicts the dangerous tendency of modern human behavior to become corrupted and blinded...Read more

Published on March 2, 1999

Paul (pbinkley@nciv.org)

I'm hoping there is more to this book than what I read.

A member of our bookclub "assigned" this book and warned us that it would be difficult. This book was not only difficult, but also boring, futile, and a general waste...Read more

Published on July 21, 1998

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