Book Review: "Fräulein Else" by Arthur Schnitzler

Fräulein Else (1924)
Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931)
56 pages

Most of us spend much of our lives only dimly aware of the nearly non-stop inner monologue that occupies our minds – our rushing stream of thoughts as we recall and re-litigate our past, or plan for and worry about our future.

Except for brief periods during which we manage to focus on the present moment – periods so exceptional that they have their own terminology, being in the zone – the typical, uncontrolled flow of our thoughts so captures us that to suddenly emerge from it feels like waking from a dream: the realization that you have no recollection of the past few miles, or even tens of miles that you’ve driven, or no understanding of the last paragraphs, even pages, you’ve been reading. And, to the extent one manages to recall what has occupied one’s thoughts, it is discovered to be a jumbled mix of memories, observations and ruminations that bear little resemblance to the hallowed idea of a rational mind – as has been said, our mind seems to have a mind of its own.

It's precisely this inner monologue that Austrian author and playwright Arthur Schnitzler uses to striking effect in his novella Fräulein Else, by presenting the story entirely through the thoughts of the nineteen-year-old title character. Different from a narrator who can, as people are wont to do, craft their telling to offer a particular viewpoint, readers follow Else’s unmediated thoughts, becoming privy to the messy mix of non sequiturs and tangents that people normally try to hide from others behind carefully constructed façades of coherence.

Schnitzler sets the story in a resort town in the Italian Alps, where Else is on vacation with her aunt and cousin. As the story opens, she bids goodbye to her cousin and his lover after playing tennis with them, and then begins the walk back to her hotel to get ready for dinner. Through her thoughts, we are introduced to a typical teenager: wondering about her cousin’s relationship; imagining how, to whom and when she herself will fall in love and get married; and considering what to do during the remainder of her stay.

The tone of her thoughts changes to unease, however, when upon entering the hotel the porter flags her down to give her an express mail from her mother in Vienna. Once back in her room she opens the letter to discover her concern born out, learning that her father, a lawyer, has gone deeply into debt – yet again – from gambling losses and poor choices in the stock market, and will be arrested if his debt is not paid off within the next two days. With family members either unreachable or no longer willing to help, her mother has turned to Else, pleading with her to approach a well-to-do family friend, Mr. von Dorsday, who happens to also be vacationing in the same town, to ask him for a loan.

Else’s consternation over the request is palpable. She despises Dorsday, who has always seemed far too solicitous, constantly making “cow eyes” at her. Contemplating with dread the task before her, she finds herself trapped in a situation that pits her love for her father against her disgust for having to engage with Dorsday, and her thoughts rapidly devolve into a turbulent and inchoate jumble.

Eventually, she does manage to screw-up her courage however, and, descending to the lobby where everyone is gathering for dinner, she seeks out Dorsday, and relates to him the situation her father is in and her mother’s request. Dorsday agrees to help her father, but then makes a stipulation that shocks Else to the quick. Already flustered by having had to approach Dorsday, his unexpected request sends her thoughts into free fall. As the evening deepens and she must decide how to respond to him, she comes to feel increasingly isolated and abandoned, and the untenable situation causes her to drift ever deeper into hallucination and hysteria.

In Fräulein Else, Schnitzler presents a compelling story of a person facing a soul-rending dilemma, and, by holding readers within the inner monologue of Else’s thoughts, creates a startlingly intimate portrait of the destructive repercussions.

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Other notes and information:

I had an odd experience while editing an intermediate version of the review. I had worked on it for a half hour or so that I had available over lunch. Then, at some point early that afternoon, I noticed that I was humming a bit of a classical piece of music that was very familiar to me, but that I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of. After trying some ineffective searches on the web, I asked my wife, and she immediately identified it as Beethoven’s “Für Elise”.

It's not a tune that I can having recall heard in some years, or for that matter hummed to myself ever, but somehow it had popped up in my mind. Though perhaps I had heard something that morning that reminded me of it, I can’t help wondering if my brain saw “Fräulein Else”, and somehow managed to trigger the memory of the tune, even though consciously I couldn’t then recall the name of what I was humming.

Nothing to do with the book itself, per se, but it does somehow tie-in to the broad idea of the chaotic nature of the workings of the mind.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "How Much of These Hills Is Gold" by C Pam Zhang

How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020)
C Pam Zhang (1990)
272 pages

Stories set in the American west of the nineteenth century tend to feature unyielding gunslingers, dogged cowboys and rapacious businessmen doing battle in morality plays pitting good against evil. In such stories, the rest of the population, those who came to the west seeking work and a better life, often serve merely as props around which the main events occur. The spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood are perhaps the most iconic examples; and even when Eastwood himself sought to present a more complex portrait in his movie Unforgiven, the plot still culminated in dramatic gunfights.

Author C Pam Zhang’s debut novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold, however, turns these conventions of the genre on their head; though set in the far-western American frontier of the mid-1800’s, cowboys and gunslingers make no appearance. And, while profit-obsessed business owners provide the larger context for the story, they remain largely invisible – powerful, implacable figures beyond justice or mercy. Zhang, in fact, builds her story around the lives of those who came to the west and ended up working for these men, the daily fight for survival of those at the bottom of the social order, scraping by on subsistence wages by mining for ore or laying track for the trains.

By focusing on deeply disenfranchised and often itinerant laborers, and by tending to identify the places in her novel more by their natural and human geography than with specific names, Zhang manages to evoke the eternal struggle of migrant, and particularly immigrant, communities. Through the specific characters of her novel, she evokes the struggle that has been waged throughout history up to the present day by so many to build a viable life.

As Zhang’s story opens, Lucy and her sibling Sam, twelve and eleven years old, respectively, find themselves orphaned – their Ba has passed away in the night, and their Ma already having gone some years earlier. Determined to give their father a proper burial, the pair pack his body into a trunk, steal a horse, and set out from the repurposed chicken coop that had been their home on the outskirts of a coal mining town in the mountain west. Traveling across the mountains, they search for a proper burial spot for their father, and some money to bury with him for the afterlife.

Wrestling with the challenges that their Chinese ancestry presents for them at seemingly every encounter, their journey becomes an attempt to make sense of the history that brought their parents to this place, and what it reveals about how their parents raised them. And, as they come to understand better their parents’ past, it begins to inform their own relationship to the American west, and the question of whether there is a future for them within it.

Out of this search for meaning and answers, Zhang brilliantly weaves together a story that explores many of the ongoing complexities of human experience, including: immigrants who come looking for a better life, but find themselves shoved aside at nearly every turn; minorities who, though second-generation Americans who’ve never known anywhere else, find themselves treated as second class citizens, both by attitude and often by law; and, women and girls who find themselves repeatedly at risk in a male-dominated world. Attempting to incorporate so many cultural challenges into one novel could have easy slipped over into becoming a disjointed laundry list of a story; Zhang, however, subtly integrates these issues and others into a profoundly moving narrative that evokes them within the context of the day-to-day lives of her characters.

It is one of those serendipitous events that happen to readers that I began Zhang’s book immediately after finishing poet Cathy Park Hong’s essay Minor Feelings: An Asian American Experience.  The two books deal with many of the same themes, if one in a fictional setting and the other autobiographical: the question of what it means to be a minority in the United States; how someone who is born a minority in the Unites States must constantly deal with the majority culture’s assumptions about them and their ancestry; how such a person thinks about the land of their ancestors and the land of their birth; and, not least, the challenges woman face in the pursuit of equality – at work and in the culture at large.

One can argue, even just from the portrayals in these two books, that much has changed for the better with respect to these issues in the century and half that lies between their settings. On the other hand, it’s hard to not be left with the dispiriting realization that somehow so little has in fact changed – that so much work yet remains to achieve the kind of fundamental cultural awareness and understanding that is needed to achieve a more fully developed community of equality and justice in the United States.

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Other notes and information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf