Books like Arcimboldo — picked by fans

I have always loved the central premise of the book, that a human being might never age, and yet a portrait of him ages as the years go by.

I love the way that Wilde used elegant and lyrical prose, always boosted by a flamboyant irony, in describing the dissolute life of an aesthete while putting it in the context of a philosophical pursuit of beauty and art. Dorian Gray himself is a deeply flawed moral character, and that is key to the success of the novel.  

When I was interviewing for a position at Notre Dame, the campus museum had an exhibit of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, which reinforced to me the fascination of Dante. 

When I began teaching the work a few years later, my students were engrossed by its riveting portrayals of moral ugliness. They were also amazed that Dante places even popes in hell. The work has so inspired my students that one of them submitted her final paper in terza rima, the form Dante uses, and another reflected on where precisely in hell she might belong.

This beautifully translated bilingual edition contains extensive, helpful commentary.

I was overwhelmed as I stood before Grünewald’s 16th-century Crucifixion in Colburg, France. At almost nine feet tall, the powerful Crucifixion was at the time the largest ever painted in Europe. 

Blood flows from Christ’s side and head, which hangs low into the breast. Some of the thorns have broken off and are projected into the flesh, which is marked with pustules, sores, and lesions. The wounds are visible, the ribs protrude, and the skin and lip colors evoke death. The nails have become instruments of torture. 

Hayum’s comprehensive historical investigations underscore the healing mission of Grünewald’s Crucifixion: ugliness can be empathetic; ill patients could identify with Christ’s suffering and pray for healing and redemption.

George Grosz was the first great artist I encountered whose works were both strikingly powerful and deeply ugly. Grosz portrayed the ugliness of the Germans during the period before Hitler’s ascent.

His works are intentionally disordered. Yet the combination of ugly content and dissonant form work together, such that on a higher level, form and content are in harmony.

Grosz painted intemperance, gluttony, lust, and unbridled power as the driving forces of society. He was a master at showing us the ugliness of the ugly. The book offers an excellent combination of images and text, with an appropriate focus on the Weimar years.

Recalling Ibbotson’s personal experience of leaving Austria for England before Hitler’s Anschluss, The Morning Gift is a witty and warm marriage of convenience story between a witty and intrepid archaeologist, Quinton Somerville, and a brilliant professor’s daughter Ruth Berger. When Ruth is accidentally left behind in Vienna after her family has emigrated to England, Quin marries Jewish Ruth and protects her from oncoming Nazi occupation: under the condition that they will part ways when both are safely back in London. But Quin and Ruth continue to run into each other again and again and again. A deliciously Austrian-flavoured book. Ibbotson’s Viennese set-sequences and memories are a love letter to her city.

This lyrical novel is told from the perspective of two characters—the mother, Genevieve, and the daughter, Elizabeth.

In her old age, the Austrian-born mother reveals the family's complex history to her American-born daughter. Though Jewish, Genevieve’s father denied that history to portray the family as Catholic. Much of the novel’s power turns on the unraveling of that history.

The book made me think about the secrets that exist within families and the ways in which people shape their histories to suit the stories they wish to believe about themselves. I thought, too, about the cost of silence within families. I was also fascinated by the portrait of Vienna, as my mother spent a number of years there during a similar time period. 

When I first read Zweig’s memoir, I initially thought it was pretentious name-dropping, mentioning one prominent fin de siècle Viennese writer or musician after another. Only years later did I warm to his memories describing a world that existed before the cataclysm of World Wars and the ultimate fate of Europe’s Jewish citizens.

In reading other memoirs from the period (such as Ernst Krenek’s–not available in English), it’s possible to see that Zweig was writing from a position of enormous privilege while also reflecting the very essence of cultural life in a world where culture was perhaps its most important characteristic and distinguishing element. 

Speaking of psychoanalysis, like much of Stefan Zweig’s work, Fear was written at the dawn of the Freudian era, in 1913 (though it wasn’t published until 1920).

A married upper-class woman is blackmailed by the working-class girlfriend of her lover, and while the tale of her panic is sometimes just an illustration of the then-new concept of the subconscious, it’s riveting anyway.

In the fifties, it became the closest Roberto Rossellini ever came to making a film noir, with Ingrid Bergman.

Roaming turtles are branded with swastikas and Nazi soldiers burn synagogues to the ground in Veza Canetti’s The Tortoises, which follows Eva and her husband Andreas, who are trapped in the country without departure visas.

Informed by her experience of the time and place (Canetti wrote the novel shortly after she herself left Vienna in 1938), Canetti paints a vivid and terrible picture of life under Nazi occupation. Published posthumously many years after her death, the novel’s road to publication is a story in and of itself. 

The Max Liebermann mystery series is about a dashing early 20th-century Viennese psychiatrist and disciple of Sigmund Freud who uses his understanding of human psychology to help solve horrible crimes.

While discussing ongoing investigations, Max and his good friend, the chubby Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt, play both chess and duets (Max accompanies Oskar’s lieder singing) while consuming delicious-sounding Viennese pastries and specialty coffees.

I love it when Max consults his mentor, Dr. Freud, and enjoy the fact that not even the most gruesome crime can get in the way of refreshments.