Divertimenti and variations

de Heimito von Doderer

"A story collection by the acclaimed Austrian novelist of the early and mid twentieth century, Divertimenti and Variations mediates traditional and experimental story technique to explore the authentic self and creates musically-based narrative forms. These narrative experiments were begun in 1923, not long after the publication of Joyce's Ulysses, with its Sirens chapter structured like a fugue. Traditional psychological realism combines with four-part "symphonic" experimental form complete with development, intermezzi, and thematic repetition and variation to demonstrate how technique is adequate to reveal and resolve conflict. Love interests, family tensions, dreams forcing the dreamers to face their struggles, physical injury, a young blind woman's gaining sight, insanity, unexamined lives: Doderer develops these themes by adeptly employing traditional representation, but he does so through innovative narrative structures grounded in the musical formalisms of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven."--book jacket.