The first English translation of an essential Austrian novel about life in postwar, mid-century Vienna, as seen through a wide and varied cast of characters.
The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the twentieth century, a novel crowded with characters who range from an elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat, to an innocent ingénue, to "respectable" shopkeepers and tireless sexual adventurers, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk. The greatest character in the book, however, is the city of Vienna, its streets and surrounding hills and woods depicted by Heimito von Doderer with all the vividness of Joyce's Dublin or Döblin's Berlin. The novel interweaves two time periods, 1908 to 1911 and 1923 to 1925, and finds its central focus and governing metaphor in the monumental outdoor double staircase that gives the book its title. Here people of the city, with their complicated pasts and ever-changing present concerns, continually intersect and then proceed on their separate ways.
The Strudlhof Steps is a masterpiece of modern Austrian literature that is at once an absorbing (and highly popular) soap opera, full of suspense and surprise, and an experimental tour de force. Vincent Kling's translation is the first into English. Heimito von Doderer (1896—1966), who was born in Vienna, Austria, received the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I and began to write during the years he spent as a prisoner of war in Siberia, eventually fleeing and returning to Vienna by foot. His novels The Strudlhof Steps and The Demons brought him international recognition.
Daniel Kehlmann is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. His most recent novel, Tyll, was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. He lives in New York, NY.
Vincent Kling is a translator and scholar of German literature who teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has translated fiction, poetry, and criticism by Heimito von Doderer, Heimrad Bäcker, Andreas Pittler, Gert Jonke, Gerhard Fritsch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Aglaja Veteranyi. He was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2013 for his translation of Veteranyi's Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta.
