Schnitzler was the Viennese novelist of the Freudian era. Beatrice and Her Son is one of his mature works, published just a year before World War One. It is is very short (three chapters and less than 100 pages) but very dense and ultimately quite shocking. Beatrice is the widow of a celebrated actor. She is probably not yet forty (Schnitzler is far too subtle to specify) and reasonably well off. Some respectable but slightly dull men of around her own age are showing an interest, now that her mourning period can be considered to be decently done. But on her summer holiday in the mountains with her son Hugo it is one of Hugo's schoolfriends that she takes to her bed. Schnitzler is a psychological novelist and sets up many reasons for her scandalous behaviour, Is it boredom, novelty, risk - or simply revenge? Revenge because the young man Fritz has hinted that Beatrice's late husband (of whom he does a good impression) had affairs - and/or revenge because Hugo is sleeping with an older woman, a former actress who may or may not have been one of his father's mistresses. Beatrice only regrets her amour when she overhears the boys talking? Are they talking - sniggering - about her? That same night Hugo comes home dejected. Beatrice guesses that his lover has dispensed with his services. How can she recover what she and Hugo had before the summer? The innocent intimacy of mother and son...
This is depth that Schnitzler is able to cram into his novella. He switches between profound internal monologue and meaningless social chit-chat. He probes Beatrice's character and motivations so deeply that a single paragraph lasts ten pages. Yet he never bores, probably because he keeps the novella so short, and he never lectures us with his ideas. Crucially, he does not judge his character. He merely gives us the symptoms and leaves us to make our own diagnosis.
This book is superb - the novella, which I love, at its best. I shall definitely be reading more Schnitzler.
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