Books like Between Nine and Nine

In turn-of-the-century Vienna the impoverished, foreign-born Stanislaus Demba, who earns his keep as a tutor of the children of the professional class, must urgently come up with two hundred crowns to take his girlfriend Sonja Hartmann to Italy in order to prevent her from going with the well-off law student Georg Weiner. In a series of highly humorous and intricately-connected vignettes the Czech-born Leo Perutz, himself an immigrant to Vienna, sends the enigmatic and generally unsympathetic Demba cascading through the city in his quest to obtain the needed money even as he strives to conceal his shameful secret. Besides offering a satire of contemporary life in his characterization of the petty bourgeoisie and the upper class, university professors and intellectuals, gallants and flirts, and gamblers and high-class thieves, Between Nine and Nine (1918) also sheds light on the forces that conditioned identity in fin-de-siecle Vienna: industrialization, misogyny, anti-Semitism, classism, and xenophobia. Through the modern, indeterminate narrative stance, the novel, originally entitled Freedom in its serialized version, ultimately depicts the contingency of self-determination and identity in a complex social milieu. On display in Between Nine and Nine are the author's skills as storyteller and caricaturist, his subtle and satiric humor, his highly refined aesthetic sensibilities, and his insightful social commentary. Readers unfamiliar with Perutz will find him delightfully provocative.