Europa Editions has a staggeringly good track record of reprinting older European works that deserve a second chance, and Ernst Lothar's The Vienna Melody is no exception. Originally published in the United States in 1944 as The Angel with the Trumpet, Lothar's hefty novel is a sweeping historical account, covering multiple generations of a single family forced to live together due to the strict will of a revered ancestor. Lothar's novel is defiantly old school, even for a book published in 1944; it more closely resembles mid-19th century epics like War and Peace than the fiction of Lothar's contemporaries. The Vienna Melody therefore wows less on a sentence-by-sentence level than as a complete, hugely ambitious work. Lothar's aims are clear: to examine the seismic changes brought about by war and unrest in the earlier 20th century and to determine the existence of a true Austrian national identity.
"Do you know what you are suffering from?" a character asks Hans, one of the novel's haunted, fatally idealistic protagonists. "An Austria complex. You are a typical case of a man disappointed in love. Except that your unfortunate passion is for a country." Lothar depicts this soul-sick nationalism in painful psychological detail, using his sprawling cast of characters to explore the human cost of international events. While his characters are swept along by the tide of history, Lothar himself observes them with both compassion and philosophical rigor. The Vienna Melody is an old-school epic with the old-school ambition of saying something meaningful about humanity. Miraculously, it succeeds. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books