The Road to the Open

Vienna before the war, seen through a young baron with money and no vocation: a love affair he mishandles, a circle of Jewish friends arguing about assimilation and Zionism, and a city that will not say aloud what it has already decided. Arthur Schnitzler was a physician before he was a playwright, and Freud told him he had reached the same conclusions by intuition. It is the most complete portrait of that Vienna written from inside it. Fifty-nine plates of Hampstead Heath and rough Channel weather by painters including Constable and Müller run through the book, landscape as the ground beneath the city's talk.