The Gist
The time is 1888. The place is Vienna, Austria. Let history run its course.
This book, A Nervous Splendor by Frederic Morton, chronicles the city of Vienna for almost a year, from July 1888 to April 1889. It details everything from the price of sugar to the rising rate of suicide, and everyone from a lowly shoe-maker’s son to the Crown Prince of Vienna. It comes back to Prince Rudolf and his mistress Mary Vetsera most often, and circles around their lives up to their deaths, when the kill themselves together. It tells the tale of a proud city growing sadder with time.
What We Think
Reviewed by Living Destiny
Number of pages: 340
Obviously, the gist is pretty sparse for this book. There just isn’t a lot to say about the plot of this book. I mean, the main character is a city. Not a person, or even multiple people. A city. Who writes this stuff? Oh, Frederic Morton does.
What I liked about this book. Hmmm. Well there wasn’t a lot, that’s for sure. I liked the character Mary Vetsera when she was first introduced. She’s described as a young lady with ‘nerve’ who adroitly climbed the social ladder with her flamboyance and ambition. She makes it her ultimate goal to capture the attention, and heart of Crown Prince Rudolf. She’s spunky, and I admire her persistence. But then she has to go make a suicide pact with Rudolf, and she doesn’t even love him. When they created their pact, she saw it not as a way to be with him but a way to well and truly make her mark on history. And I just didn’t like her anymore. I liked some of the quotes in the book too, like this one: “Why hast thou lived? Why hast thou suffered . . . To what purpose?” There were a few little tidbits in there that really caught my eye and made me think. But only a few. The writing was, for the most part, dry and impersonal. I couldn’t find any of the writer’s personality or style in the writing. It was purely factual, and made for a very boring read. The only other thing I liked in the whole book was the pictures. They were inserted for a historical purpose, much like the entire book, but I liked them for the connection they made to the people. With the pictures I could visualize the characters, and recreate their lives. Without them, this bland book would have been even duller. Now, what I didn’t like. Unfortunately, I can’t say everything, but it comes pretty close to everything. The writing style, as I mentioned before, was totally awful. There was no spark of life in it. It was like a heartbeat monitor hooked up to a corpse. Just one obnoxious flat line screaming out in a monotone, trying desperately to catch someone’s attention. It was so boring I almost fell asleep while reading it. Then there was the subject itself. Sorry, but I just don’t care about the city of Vienna during 1888. Maybe if the book was only about Mary Vetsera and Crown Prince Rudolf I would have liked it more, but it wasn’t. It was about the whole city. It jumped back and forth to basically everybody in Vienna. There’d be a paragraph about Sigmund Freud, then one about the Crown Prince, then one about Katharina Schratt, then Johann Strauss. And on and on and on. So many different people talked about, forgotten for ten chapters, and brought back in, expecting to be remembered. 9.5 times out of 10, I didn’t remember them. The characters were all so brief in their appearances, I couldn’t connect to any of them. The only common element was the city, and I didn’t feel any deep personal connection to Vienna either. In fact, the only connections I felt to any part of the story at all came when there were mentions of the theatre, music, writing, or some other sort of art, those being my passions in life. Otherwise, I simply didn’t care.
Basically, I read this book for history class. There were slim pickings for the book you could read, and this one was what I got. I know it’s a history assignment, but I still had some hope for it. It was quickly squashed under the weight of heavy, emotionless text and too many characters who didn’t develop enough to care about. Don’t ever read this book for fun. And if you find yourself presented with a history writing assignment, which I’m about to turn this review into, don’t pick this book.
Real Teen Rating ~ F: Don’t even bother!
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