There have been many historical and sociological investigations of the cultural life of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century and of the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Martina Wied portrays the same phenomena in her novels. Her early works belong to the cultural climate that produced Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1931; translated as The Man without Qualities, 1965), Heimito von Doderer's Die Strudlhofstiege (1951; partially translated as "The Strudlhof Steps," 1974), and Hermann Broch's Die Verzauberung (1976; translated as The Spell, 1988). Eastern Europe plays an important part in her fiction, as it does in the work of Doderer, Karl Emil Franzos, Joseph Roth, Manès Sperber, and Robert Neumann. Her early fiction has some melodramatic traits--bloodshed, crime, suicides, and unexpected strokes of fate--but her work is invariably unsentimental and realistic and provides profound understanding of the political and sociological problems of her day. Although there is...