I always find the most interesting books when I happen to be looking for something else. This time around I was searching for a particular book by Heinrich Böll, and skimming the spines I came across a row of books by Austrian writer, Vicki Baum. Her book Grand Hotel was one of the book chosen for my last postal reading group round. Unfortunately it was also one of only a very few books that I wasn't able to read, though I have always meant to go back and find a copy to read later. My library has the original German version, Menschen im Hotel, but that won't do me much good. Perhaps I can redeem myself by reading one of her other works (and she has quite an extensive list of books to her name).
Vicki Baum was born in Vienna, though she eventually emigrated to the United States. She was married twice and during the First World War was a nurse. She had a varied career as she begin as a harpist and later worked as a journalist, then taking to writing. She was quite successful and a number of her books were adapted to film, including the famous Grand Hotel. Her early books were written in German and translated into English, but she wrote her later books in English. From what I've read her books were bestsellers, very popular as entertaining reads though perhaps never quite achieved high literary status. Middlebrow fiction? Probably most of what I read is middlebrow, so I'm very interested in reading something by her.
My library has more than a dozen books by her, most of them being German editions, but I did find one in English that sounds very appealing, Marion Alive. It was published in 1942 and chronicles the life of one ordinary woman from the turn of the century to the present (early 1940s) day. Some kind cataloger cut the blurb from the dust jacket and pasted it into the back inside cover, so I can get a glimpse of the story. Marion Sommer is one of Baum's "most brilliantly realized characters".
"Utterly human, independent, spirited and humorous, her main belief is that it is fun to be alive whatever may happen. Marion Alive is a remarkable story of a woman's spiritual, intellectual and emotional development; more than that it is a superb picture of pre-war Vienna, or Germany during and after the World war, when the seeds of Nazism were already sprouting, and of the terrible world cataclysm which has climaxed Adolf Hitler's bid for world conquest."
Since Vienna is one of my very favorite places, I'm particular interested in this story for how she will portray it before the war. It's a longish novel with close to 600 pages, so I am not likely to get to it anytime soon (though what better time than this month as I am reading other German authors). I did dip into it just a little bit and it looks like the story opens in 1940 with the collapse of France then moves quickly back into Marion's childhood. Here's a little taste:
"All I see when I think of Vienna are plumes of Persian lilac in every shade from white to deep purple. And chestnut trees. There were chestnut trees everywhere, clumps of them in the public parks, avenues of them, groups of chestnut trees in all dreamy old gardens behind the baroque houses of the nobility and a sea of chestnut trees in the Prater. Everything was very big and tall and wonderful in Vienna when I was a child. Later on it began to shrink and to choke me, so that I had to go away from that dying town. And when I went there for a visit many years later, I was just another American tourist, Mrs. John W. Sprague, who shocked the hotel porter by understanding when he swore in German; and the streets looked dark and narrow, and everything was cramped and crowded, and the elegant big house where we had lived had become small and shabby."