The Vienna Writers Circle
The German annexation of Austria in 1938 plunges its cosmopolitan European capital into the nightmare of authoritarian restrictions and genocide that had already gathered efficiency in Hitler’s Reich. Men of various backgrounds try first to negotiate and then to survive the regime and save the ones they love.
The author has chosen to write under this pseudonym to celebrate his Lithuanian Jewish victim ancestors. He is well-known British thriller author John Matthews. This led me to expect a tighter, more compelling plot.
The Circle of the title evokes Freud’s famous Circle of Viennese luminaries, but again this lure disappointed me. A nod was given to the institution: photos incriminating Jews who belonged to this salon are destroyed or hidden to throw the SS off the trail. Crime novelists, such as two of our heroes are portrayed, almost certainly did not find a place in Freud’s “gentlemen’s room.” Of course, the Nazis burned books, Freud’s and those of other literary lights. But crime novels are the most seditious thing you can come up with to write?
It is a potentially tension-raising fact that many Jews, whole families, resorted to taking on new identities and lives. Still, when we add these new names to an already poorly differentiated cast, hopeless relinquishment overcomes the reader.
Page 232 is where the first indication of “writing to save my life” appears. In fact, it is not writing; it is editing. And when the work and corrections are so mundane, the author is best warned away from including them in his work, lest the fictional editor’s complaints tempt the reader to unfavorable comparisons with the real work she holds in her hands.
[Ed. note: this review has been amended to correct two factual errors.]