[In the following review of Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas, Peaco contends that Dream Story is reminiscent of the stories of Franz Kafka.]

Those who read Schnitzler (1862-1931), a Viennese observer of his city's contradictions and decadence, must face the discomfort of learning a great deal about desperate souls. [In Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas a]n adulterous woman leaves the scene of an accident in which her lover dies. A man whose wife has just died finds love letters to her from his best friend, who is about to arrive for the funeral. In the novella Night Games, the rise and fall of a young gambler's fortunes and his increasingly flawed reasoning unfold in obsessive, tortuous detail, such that his demise comes as a relief. It's noteworthy that Schnitzler (an undervalued genius, as John Simon asserts in his foreword to this new translation) is an early practitioner of modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness. But he demonstrates with his potent premises that the most important thing in fiction is the quality of the idea. In Dream Story, the other novella in the collection, a couple exchange small confessions, igniting jealousy and resentment that destroys their love. (This work inspired Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut—a “wretched movie version,” Simon scoffs.) The man acts out his estrangement by racing through a series of dreamlike encounters driven by lust and reckless curiosity. His bizarre journey becomes an outward corollary to the inward workings of his poisonous emotions. These elaborate paths to ruin and dramatizations of inward processes might suggest the work of Kafka, Schnitzler's central European contemporary. While Kafka's characters are often paralyzed and stuck inside themselves, Schnitzler's are passionate and running feverishly through the world, though no less stuck. In this way, reading Schnitzler creates an intense mixture of arousal and dread.