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David Vogel has long been regarded as a leading figure of 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 Gurdweill and Baroness Thea von Takow, who treats her husband with cruelty and disdain. In spite of this, Gurdweill 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 cafés 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 collapse—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.
“Its sharp observations about courtship, human folly, and married life, delivered with fluid intensity, still resonate…Shot through with farce and droll humour, this is a cautionary tragic tale about who not to marry.”
—Herald Sun
“Both extremely beautiful and troubling…A great book in the manner of Kafka.”
—Le Monde
“Vogel maintains a masterful balance between convincingly random confusion and subtle symbolic resonance, in which the early Freudian influence is unmistakable…Married Life is merciless in its depiction of a bleak world in which fate is both arbitrary and supremely malign.”
—Los Angeles Times
“This is an important novel…The complex atmosphere of Viennese culture between the wars is conveyed marvellously…A work of literature that echoes both Kafka and Mann.”
—Publishers Weekly