A review by cub_jones
Desire and Delusion: Three Novellas by Arthur Schnitzler

5.0

Some of the most discomfiting fiction I've ever read. Suffocating, beautiful, and precise. Schnitzler should be mentioned in the same breath as Kafka. They make an incredible pair, each exploring the violence and repressed terror of bourgeois society under the Austro-Hungarian empire from different angles and styles, with Schnitzler firmly trapping the reader in a more grounded, psychological nightmare. Each story here is a painfully plausible case study in anxiety and paranoia that goes somewhere inevitable without being wholly predictable.