SOURCE: Gay, Peter. “Sex and the Single-Minded.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (24 March 2002): R11.

In the following review of Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas, Gay discusses the themes of love, sex, and death in the stories, and comments on Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Dream Story in the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut.

Arthur Schnitzler is not nearly so familiar to American readers as he should be, and this has led to starkly differing views of his literary stature. In a brief foreword to Night Games [Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas], John Simon places him “in the vicinity of Proust, Joyce, and Chekhov,” while Phyllis Rose, in the New York Times Book Review, dismissed him as “a relatively obscure Austrian writer.”

Indeed, Schnitzler has no Ulysses, no A la recherche du temps perdu, no Cherry Orchard to his credit. He considered himself (as Simon notes) an...