Married Life
The central character in Vogel’s great novel, Married Life, is Dr. Gurdweil, a young Jewish writer married to a Christian aristocrat, Thea. She enjoys humiliating him and has little motherly feeling for their son. Betrayal is a permanent feature of this diastrous marriage, with Thea’s frequent infidelities and Gurdweil’s desultory affair with the Jewish Lotte, who really loves him. The setting is Vienna between the wars, and the novel is filled with descriptions of the city and its various inhabitants. Among the characters are the man who is in love with Lotte, a repulsive bookseller, a philosopher-shoemaker, and Thea’s sadistic brother. The central story, however, is about Gurdweil’s loneliness and unhappy love for his wife which impel him to take revenge on her. The passages which depict his suffering are among the most compelling in the novel.
- Languages
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Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish
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English
London, Peter Halban, 1988; pback: 1998;
New York, Grove Press, 1989;
New York /London, Toby Press, 2007;
Sydney, Scribe, 2013 -
Spanish
Madrid, Anaya-Muchnik, 1994 -
Italian
Milan, Adelphi, 1991; 1999; new ed. forthcoming -
French
Paris, Stock, 1992;
Paris, Editions de l'Olivier, 2015 -
German
Munich, Paul List, 1992;
pback: Frankfurt, S. Fischer, 1994;
Berlin, Aufbau, 2017 -
Dutch
Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 1992;
Amsterdam, Meulenhoff/Quarto, 1993; 1998; pback: 2002;
Amsterdam, Meulenhoff/Volkskrant, 2007;
Amsterdam, Atheneum, 2014 -
Chinese
Hefei, Anhui Literature & Art, 1998 -
Russian
Moscow/Jerusalem, Mosti Kulturi/Gesharim, 2003 -
Turkish
Istanbul, Yapi Kredi, 2012
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| Title | Married Life |
|---|---|
| Writer's Last Name | Vogel |
| Writer's First Name | David |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher (Hebrew) | Hakibbutz Hameuchad |
| No. Pages | 330pp. |
| Book title - Hebrew (phonetic) | Chayei Nisuʹim |
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“ Both extremely beautiful and troubling... A great book in the manner of Kafka. It was written prior to Max Blecher and Bruno Schulz, and heralded both. ”
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“ Vogel maintains a masterful balance between convincingly random confusion and subtle symbolic resonance, in which the early Freud influence is unmistakable.”
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“ One of the most important works of the 1930s... Vogel was one of the first writers to give literary form to themes that so occupied intellectual Vienna.”
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“ Vogel is a master writer. ”