Married Life: a novel

Description

David Vogel has long been regarded as a leading figure on Hebrew literature, and his work has been compared to that of Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka. Married Life, which was first published in 1929, is Vogel's magnum opus - a sweeping portrait of a doomed marriage and a doomed city. Set in Vienna, the novel tells of the relationship between the penniless writer Rudolf Gurdwell and Baroness Thea von Takow, who treats her husband with cruelty and disdain. In spite of this, Gurdwell struggles to find the will to leave his wife, even when the devoted Lotte Bondheim offers him the prospect of true happiness. Yet this is no mere story of a love triangle. In astonishingly vivid detail, Vogel evokes the atmosphere of 1920s Vienna, taking us from fashionable cafes and aristocratic estates to the shoemaker's workshop and the almshouse. With decadence and poverty existing side by side, Vienna is depicted as a city on the brink of collape - a haunting prefigurement of the horrors to come. With its rich, vital prose, and its profound insight into the human condition, Married Life is truly a modern classic.

David Vogel (1891-1944) was born in Satanov, Podolia (now Russia), to a religious family, and at the age of twenty started travelling to the well-known centres of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. When World War I broke out he was living in Vienna, where he was arrested as an enemy alien. In 1923, Vogel published his first collection of poems. Vogel came to Tel Aviv in 1929, but left for Berlin after a year, and later settled in Paris. After the outbreak of World War II, he was imprisoned by the French as an Austrian citizen, and later by the Nazis as a Jew. In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he perished.

'Both extremely beautiful and troubling... A great book in the manner of Kafka.' - Le Monde