Yellow Street: A Novel in Five Scenes

By Veza Canetti

Book Overview

Ironically depicts the lives of leather-merchants in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna and the despair, poverty, and declining moral values of the 1930s. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811211606
• ISBN13: 9780811211604
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 139 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Ironic glimpses of inter-World War Vienna

A supposed "novel," Yellow Street strings together five short stories by Veza Canetti, the wife of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Elias Canetti (Auto-da-fé, Crowds and Power). They were originally published serially in a Vienna Marxist newspaper, Arbeiter Zeitung in 1932-33 (that is, before Hitler came to power in Germany, let alone Austria). Some of the characters from the first four stories reappear in the fifth (and best) "The Fixer." All are set on a street of leather merchants in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna. The stories focus on lower-class women who are oppressed by middle-class women and on husbands seizing and squandering the inheritances of dutiful, unpretentious wives. There are wry twists, especially in the oblivious young girl's actions in "The Fixer" and the denouement of "The Canal" and "The Tiger." The hardest-to-take tale of unscrupulous grinding down is "The Ogre." The stories fill 126 pages. Although set later and in a lower-class milieu, these stories recall the earlier ones of the Viennese master Arthur Schnitzler. All are based on real characters and events. The household division of labor left "invention" to her husband (though most of his books are nonfiction, including his great three-volume memoirs.)