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Vienna OO, the first of Eugene K. Garber’s Eroica Trilogy, is populated by characters who closely resemble actual luminaries of fin de siecle Vienna – Mahler, Schiele, Klimt, Freud. But the book features not only a shifting cast of characters whose personalities are artfully destabilized; it also deploys a syntactically innovative style that sometimes flows, sometimes plunges into the depths of the infamous and exotic capital of empire.
But the real hero of the book is the city herself. And the inexorable movement of the book is one of disrobing, an exquisite striptease. Gorgeous garments fall away one by one fixing the eye of the reader for a great while on their swirl of gold-gilded paintings, music of lush strings and brazen horns, tales of travel to exotic lands. But soon, and more and more intensely, the reader begins to glimpse the ambiguous body beneath. Vienna is beautiful but sick. She laughs gaily and weeps secretly. She loves and fears death equally. She represses and luxuriates in the erotic. The soul of propriety, she is haunted by Doppelgangers and dybbuks.
For every story, then, readers become equilibrists, walking the razor’s edge of art and destruction, feeling beneath this glorious time of artistic triumph the splintering of the rotted timbers of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And yet in these cunningly constructed stories the reader’s engagement never flags, for nothing ever seems quite predestined. At every twist and turn hope and fear hang suspended until the last word, and often beyond.
