$29.95 AUD
Category: Fiction
Michael Rost, an 18-year-old Jewish youth hungry for experience, comes to Vienna and forms passing relationships with everyone who crosses his path: whores, revolutionaries, paupers, army officers, and rich men who frequent cabarets and gambling dens. When Peter Dean, a shady businessman, takes the penn
Michael Rost, an 18-year-old Jewish youth hungry for experience, comes to Vienna and forms passing relationships with everyone who crosses his path: whores, revolutionaries, paupers, army officers, and rich men who frequent cabarets and gambling dens. When Peter Dean, a shady businessman, takes the penniless Rost under his wing, he rents a room in the home of an affluent bourgeois family. He is seduced by the lady of the house, Gertrude, while her husband is away on business, and shortly after starts an affair with her 16-year-old daughter as well. This love triangle threatens to destroy the entire family, and when the master of the house returns home, Rost is forced to move out. In his new lodgings, his loneliness, his nocturnal wanderings, and his casual romantic encounters become second nature. Some twenty years later, he moves to Paris, drifts around between prostitutes and occasional love affairs, impoverished by gambling and yet unable to find a home. As in the work of Vogel's contemporaries, the mesmerising figure of Michael Rost reflects the tortured relationship between cosmopolitan Jewish intellectuals and early-20th-century Europe.
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