Heimito von Doderer, The Demons (1956)

Okay, so I read this!  Let's not pay any heed to how long it took.  I mean, I suppose it's not that bad, comparatively, but dude, I read all of Proust (which is something like four times as long) in less time than this.  Still, it IS long--this two-volume edition is about sixteen hundred pages, though it's worth noting that that's with a surprisingly large font--with one more like The Man without Qualities, it'd probably be more like thirteen hundred.

(Oh, you expected me to have a post about all...this  *gestures at everything in general*?  Well, I don't want to leave you in suspense, so guess what?  I'm agin it.  More than that seems futile.  My rage has been well-articulated by others, not that I won't probably have an outburst at some point.)

(Another parenthetical!  Wanna know what that cover image is?  It's not credited in the book itself, so pretty hard to figure out, but I actually wrote to the publisher, and they helpfully pointed me here.  Really should've credited in the book, though, public domain or not.)

So what's it about?  Well, it's undeniably somewhat centerless, which I think is kind of the point--all these people swirling centifugally around.  Tons of characters, many of them also from The Strudlhof Steps.  The whole thing culminates (in a hundred-odd-page chapter) with the July Revolt of 1927.  It's sort of hard to know what one should highlight, so let's just nitpick the wikipedia entry:

Among the more prominent characters are a man who half-jokingly is obsessed with fat women,

Kajetan von Schlaggenberg.  "Fat females," as he consistently refers to them, at least in the translation.  And this isn't just about weight; it's also about a kind of bourgeois hausfrau air.  Also, it's not half-joking, but, repulsive character though he is, it's only a temporary mania.

a woman who laments not being a musician, 

Kajetan's sister Quapp (apparently that's somehow short for Charlotte?), and she IS a musician, at least for most of the book; she just doesn't have the sort of feeling to go professional.  But also, when she recogizes this a huge weight is lifted off her and she gets a large inheritance and ends up in a happy marriage, so you know.

a weaver who studies Latin, 

Leonhard Kakabsa; it's not accurate to say that this novel has a "hero," but if it did, it would probably be Leonhard.  He studies Latin, obsessively in fact, out of a perceived sense of limitations to his world.  And then--in a twist that seems weirdly Horatio-Alger-esque, though it's probably more symbolic--he gets a job as a librarian from a rich prince.  Hooray!

And ALSO, you can't mention Leonhard without mentioning his love interest.  Mary K. was the first character we met in The Strudlhof Steps.  At that time, we were informed that she would later lose a leg in a streetcar accident.  This happens near the end of the novel, and she only doesn't bleed to death because a quick-thinking Melzer applies a tourniquet.  Also, she's widowed, though there's a LOT of stuff in these books, and I can't tell whether that happened before or after.  But here she has totally pulled herself together, by sheer force of will, getting along okay with a prosthetic, and now she's gonna marry Leonhard.  Hurrah!

and a rich boy who is fascinated by the study of history.

This refers to René Stangeler, because who else could it refer to, though it is a little odd.  His family is well-off, but I don't know if you'd say rich; maybe you would, but for most of the book he's still concerned with making a living, so I dunno.  Also, "fascinated by the study of history?"  He's a historian, but I'm not sure how "fascinated" he is.  But maybe it's a meaningless distinction.  Doderer's self-insert character, and he doesn't seem to like him very much.  Still, he ends up as well as you could hope; he's got a history librarian job lined up (yes, a DIFFERENT library job than Leonhard), and he's finally going to marry his dang girlfriend Grete.  Finally!  Make her an honest woman, dammit!  I know that's an out-of-date phrase; I used it anyway.

I also just want to point out that there's a character, Meisgeier, known as "The Claw," who's a murderer.  As in, he's just sort of going around trying to murder people all the time.  It's a bit surreal, hey.  A murderer.  Gotta get some of that Moosbrugger energy, I guess.

Sometimes the unfocused feel of the book made me feel adrift, but towards the end, things came together for me, and I was legit worried about characters I like being killed in the revolt.  It's really, really definitely a book that calls for rereading, though I don't know when that will happen.

But there's one other thing I need to touch on.  This seems like, and in many ways is, a traditional ninteenth-century-style novel.  But there's ALSO, once you get into it, some unexpected metafictional elements.  The back of the book tells us that it's "Narrated by retired civil servant Georg von Geyrenhoff," and...that's only sort of true.  Part of it--a distinct minority--are narrated by Geyrenhoff (who was also a minor character in The Strudlhof Steps), but most of it is third-person omniscient.  And said omniscient narrator doesn't appear to be too fond of Geyrenoff; he (?) refers to him as "rather slow-witted" and tells us that "only bits of Geyrenhoff have been included."  Have they?  By whom?  What's happening here?  There's definitely an aspect to this that I don't fully grasp.

One other thing I can't ignore: at one point, René is called in to a castle to examine the library.  While he's there, he discovers a fifteenth-century manuscript, an account of a witch trial.  This is included in full, in René's translation, which includes that good ol' Early-Modern-English spelling (something similar in the German, presumably).  The story is narrated by a scribe who was involved, Ruodlieb von der Vläntsch. It treats of two older women who have been accused of witchcraft, and the narrator and another guy, Heimo, have to interrogate/torture them.  I was bracing myself for something very unpleasant here, but as it turns out, it's much different and much stranger than I could've anticipated.  Heimo is the more bloodthirsty of the two, at least rhetorically, but I'm not gonna lie: their interrogations look more like sadomasochistic games than what we'd think of as torture, and in the end, they're released and given expensive gifts for their troubles.  This is sort of explained by the fact that this is a secular rather than relgious trial; there was (per the text) the need to do these things because the common people were terrified of witches.  But it's still weird; Stangeler suggests it may be an allegory (he thinks Ruodlieb's name sounds fake, but I dunno, there's a medieval romance by that name.  

But look, either way: "Heimo."  You don't need much Spanish to note that were this a Spanish name, the diminutive form would be "Heimito."  And, in point of fact, "Heimito" isn't a normal German name; it's Germanization of the Spanish "Jaimito."  So...what does this mean?  Doderer himself, as I understand it, was a bit of a psychosexual mess (though also, I think, self-aware enough to understand that); does he conceive of what he does as akin to this ambigous torture?  A Doderer scholar needs to explain it!  I don't get it!  Actually, a class just on this book would be super-interesting, in my opinion.

At any rate, I'm definitely going to read more, but something else for now.  I've been reading Doderer for the past five months, fercryinoutloud.