Heimito von Doderer, The Strudlhof Steps (1951)

Look there's an elephant in the room, so let's get that over with first: yes, Doderer was a capital-N Nazi. This, unfortunately, is true. He joined the party in 1932, for reasons that seem a little obscure; no one seems to be able to say whether it was just because he wanted to get in with the Nazi establishment to benefit his nascent writing career, or whether it was actual ideology--but at any rate, a whole lot of people who would know testify to his disillusionment with the party as of 1940, and his remorse for getting involved, so, I mean. When his work started to appear in English, a lot of reviewers seem to have started from one point--"Nazi"--and used that to basically make up narratives for his work that simply aren't there. If you would prefer to disassociate yourself from anyone who was a Nazi, I understand. But to me, personally, this he's too interesting an author to pass up.  Also, I DO believe in redemption, even for three-time Trump voters, in the extremely unlikely even that they're repentant and willing to do their best to make amends, so come on.

Doderer is best known--as I understand it, though I really don't know how to tell what a not-very-well-known author is known for--for his meganovel The Demons, which was translated to English soon after its publication (the publisher was gambling on Doderer becoming a new sensation; it was not a winning bet). But any way you slice it, it was a weird way to introduce him to the Anglophone world, mainly because The Demons is actually a sequel of sorts to his previous novel, The Strudlhof Steps. As I understand it, he had the idea for The Demons, and maybe even started writing it, until thinking, wait a second, I should write this other novel first, to get things started. And truly, the idea that he decided that before he could write this thirteen hundred page novel, he had to first write an eight-hundred page novel to provide context...it makes me laugh. Doderer may have had an outsized influence on the fantasy writers of our time. At any rate, The Strudlhof Steps obviously would have been a better choice, what with being less intimidatingly massive and being, like, where you're meant to start. You would think!

But no! Instead, the English translation of The Demons quickly fell out of print (it's recently been reissued by a small press called Wiseblood Books), and The Strudlhof Steps remained stubbornly untranslated. For a long time, the only option for non-German-speaking Doderer fans was to learn it (and I doubt that Doderer's German prose is going to be particularly easy for a non-native-speaker). This English translation only appeared very belatedly in 2021. But appear it did. Boom.

Right, so what's this book about? Well, if you look on the back cover, it's going to tell you that it's about a ton of different people in Vienna in the years before and after World War I (none of it takes place during the actual war), and also, it's one of those books like Ulysses or Berlin Alexanderplatz where the city is kind of a character too. That all is accurate, but it doesn't really TELL you much, does it? Who are these people? What are we doing?

And yet, it's hard to know how else to describe it. This is a long novel, but it's not a meganovel like In Search of Lost Time or The Man without Qualities or for that matter The Demons (my totally arbitrary criterion for "meganovel" is a minimum of thirteen hundred pages). And yet, it kind of FEELS like one, because they're generally similar in having very limited plots and therefore being hard to describe. The title does have a Melville-style "or" though: "Melzer and the Depth of the Years." "The depth of the years" probably gives you some sense of the social panorama, and if the book has a protagonist, yeah, it's probably Major Melzer (we never learn his first name: Doderer four-wall-breakingly disavows any knowledge of it. His main thing is the transition from military to civilian life, and also his romances--the book ends with his happy marriage, which is a very nineteenth-century thing to do.

The other major character (or at least, the one you can't talk about this book without mentioning) is Rene Stangeler, definitely a Doderer stand-in (he spends four years in a Siberian work camp, as did Doderer--it's a wonder he lived to write anything), part of a large bourgeois family; Doderer is sympathetic to him, but treats him unsparingly, and unlike Melzer, his romance ends (well, continues--I think it's going to be taken up again in The Demons--in fact, it's conceivable that I may be TRICKING you, and I'm already a good ways into it) badly, with him in a constant state of war with his girlfriend Grete.

Apart from that, it really is such a social whirl I can't really describe it: marriages, affairs, deaths, inheritances, plotting--the works, all presented in an extravagant style, filled with occasional metafictional elements, fourth wall breaks as mentioned above, bizarre asides, little bits of wordplay. There is a--sort of--narrative thread, but it's so attenuated (albeit amusing) that it can't be thought of as a backbone of the book, involving plans to smuggle tobacco into the country to avoid taxes and subvert Austria's government monopoly on it. How exactly this to work is vague and varying, but it all involves a woman who turns out to have an identical twin sister living in Argentina, if that tells you anything. I've seen review describe this as "Pynchonesque;" I personally think Doderer's similarities to Pynchon are pretty limited, but you can probably put them somewhere along the same spectrum.

Another interesting thing is that although the book takes place over the course of seven years (1908-11 and 1923-25), it only takes place during summers. This becomes very apparent with the many seasonal references. It somehow creates the effect of a sort of perpetual, timeless slow motion, if that makes sense. I really dig it. The whole "Vienna" is a character thing--well, I can't say I got much of a sense of the city, but I dunno--do I really feel like I understand Dublin having read Ulysses?

Anyway, if you think I'm not going to read The Demons next, you, sir or madam or...is there an equivalent of those two for non-binary people? Well regardless of who you are, you're a first-class buffoon.