Fräulein Else - Arthur Schnitzler
What an incredibly strange book this was. I never would have heard of this if it hadn't been for Milan Kundera's Immortality, which references it briefly in a way that made me very curious about it.
The basic story is simple. A young woman's father accrues gambling debts, and in order to help him pay them off she agrees to show herself naked to a millionaire. Kundera implies that this is something of an erotic novel but I didn't get any of that from it. Instead this read more as a real-time, stream of consciousness account of a young woman's mental unravelling as she falls apart under huge pressure.
I'm unsure how I felt about this. It's almost feverish, at times slipping into being a little incoherent. I'm not sure if that's an issue of the translation or it's just a strange writing style - I'm very aware that this is a century old and that I don't often read fiction from that era, so this could be a me problem rather than a problem of the book.
I think I largely liked it but didn't get quite as much out of it as I was hoping to. Perhaps Milan Kundera oversold how good this is, or perhaps it just wasn't entirely for me. I'm glad I read it, though.