The Vienna Paradox
- Book Review,
by Marjorie Perloff
From Publishers Weekly
Since emigrating from Vienna with her family in 1938 at the age of six-and-a-half, the former Gabriele Mintz has made a reputation for herself under the penname Marjorie Perloff. Her books (The Dance of the Intellect; The Futurist Moment, etc.) have established her as one of the major American critics of 20th century modernist and late-modernist writing. In this memoir, she traces her intellectual and social development, showing how they were shaped by her experience as a refugee from a hostile territory that she would not see again until 1955, after she was married but still before she launched her career. Though Perloff works in resonances from Vienna’s modernist artists throughout her book, most of it remains a straightforward telling of who her family was and is, and of how she navigated her way from the New York City schools to Oberlin College. Not a conventional coming-of-age memoir that processes things emotionally, Perloff’s story of her youth hones in on the institutions, people and places that formed her logos, by chance and by choice. In that, it is entirely successful.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Adam Kirsch, New York Sun, 2 June 2004
A rare and fascinating exception to the rule...a moving and delightful book.
Corinna Lothar, Washington Times, 27 June 2004
A fascinating and lively account of the cultural, political and intellectual time in which Margie Perloff lived.
Stephen Motika, The Palisadian-Post, 15 July 2004
Perloff's book reminds us how difficult it is to maintain the privileges of a free society.
American Poet, Fall 2004
With great humor and, of course, intelligence, Perloff allows readers access to her memories of artistic and personal first loves.
Andrew DuBois, Harvard Review, Fall 2004
One of our finest critics and a tireles advocate for the avant-garde....To have this memoir now is a boon.
Jewish Book World, Winter 2004
Those interested in reading about the noteworthy participants of that bygone Austrian culture will find this book fascinating.
Book Description
A fascinating memoir of refugee flight and survival, intellectual yet highly personal, by one America's eminent literary critics. The Vienna Paradox is Marjorie Perloff's memoir of growing up in pre-World War II Vienna, her escape to America in 1938 with her upper-middle-class, highly cultured, and largely assimilated Jewish family, and her self-transformation from the German-speaking Gabriele Mintz to the English-speaking Marjorie—who also happened to be the granddaughter of Richard Schüller, the Austrian foreign minister under Chancellor Dollfuss and a special delegate to the League of Nations. Compelling as the story is, this is hardly a conventional memoir. Rather, it interweaves biographical anecdote and family history with speculations on the historical development of early 20th-century Vienna as it was experienced by her parents' generation, and how the loss of their "high" culture affected the lives of these cultivated refugees in a democratic United States that was, and remains, deeply suspicious of perceived "elitism." This is, in other words, an intellectual memoir, both elegant and heartfelt, by one of America's leading critics, a narrative in which literary and philosophical reference is as central as the personal.
About the Author
Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Stanford University and the author and editor of over a dozen books on literary and art criticism as well as cultural history. She credits her 1996 study, Wittgenstein's Ladder (University of Chicago Press), with setting her on the speculative path that led to the writing of The Vienna Paradox. "I delight in the pure love of life that Perloff keeps displaying in a completely sensuous and REVIEW: The Vienna Paradox is funny and often modest without being at all merely ironizing of experience. (Susan Stewart)
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