Married Life

a novel
David Vogel

‘Both extremely beautiful and troubling … A great book in the manner of Kafka.’

Le Monde

‘Vogel maintains a masterful balance between convincingly random confusion and subtle symbolic resonance, in which the early Freudian influence is unmistakable … Married Life is merciless in its depiction of a bleak world in which fate is both arbitrary and supremely malign.’

Los Angeles Times

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‘Its sharp observations about courtship, human folly, and married life, delivered with fluid intensity, still resonate ... Shot through with farce and droll humour, this is a coutionart tragic tle about who not to marry.’

Herald Sun

David Vogel has long been regarded as a leading figure of Hebrew literature, and his work has been compared to that of Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka.

Married Life, which was first published in 1929, is Vogel’s magnum opus — a sweeping portrait of a doomed marriage and a doomed city. Set in Vienna, the novel tells of the relationship between the penniless writer Rudolf Gurdweill and the Baroness Thea von Takow, who treats her husband with cruelty and disdain. In spite of this, Gurdweill struggles to find the will to leave his wife, even when the devoted Lotte Bondheim offers him the prospect of true happiness.

Yet this is no mere story of a love triangle. In astonishingly vivid detail, Vogel evokes the atmosphere of 1920s Vienna, taking us from fashionable cafés and aristocratic estates to the shoemaker’s workshop and the almshouse. With decadence and poverty existing side by side, Vienna is depicted as a city on the brink of collapse — a haunting prefigurement of the horrors to come.

With its rich, vital prose, and its profound insight into the human condition, Married Life is truly a modern classic.

‘Both extremely beautiful and troubling … A great book in the manner of Kafka.’

Le Monde

Los Angeles Times

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Details

Format:Hardback

Size: 201mm × 135mm

Extent:512pp

ISBN (13):9781922070586

RRP:£16.99

Pub date:8 May 2014

Rights Held: World English, UK & Commonwealth

High-res cover:Download Image

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AUTHOR

David Vogel

David Vogel was born in 1891 in Satanov, Podolia (now Ukraine), and when World War I broke out he was living in Vienna, where he was arrested as an enemy alien. He emigrated to Tel Aviv in 1929, but left for Berlin after a year, and later settled in Paris. After the outbreak of World War II, he was imprisoned by the French as an Austrian citizen, and later by the Nazis as a Jew. In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he perished.

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Married Life

a novel David Vogel

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AUTHOR

a novel
David Vogel