Vienna

Surely Vienna must offer many such books?
John Irving used to set parts of most of his books there, and I quite recently read The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers, which is set in Vienna during the Turkish Siege of 1529, but I am sure there are books that give an even closer look at this great European capital.

The Third Man, of course, and The Fig Eater by Jody Shields, which I haven't read yet, unfortunately.

I haven't read many books by Austrian writers, though, albeit I have Musil's daunting The Man Without Qualities sitting reproachfully on my shelf... He or Thomas Bernhard have probably written about Vienna.

I did a tagmash on Vienna, novel and found: The seven-per-cent solution; being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. by Nicholas Meyer, in which Sherlock Holmes visits Freud in Vienna. I think this was made into a TV broadcast.

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth is a beautiful novel of musicians, partially set in Vienna.

The Sensualist : a novel by Barbara Hodgson has a woman going to a presumably fictional anatomical museum in Vienna. This is an illustrated novel, some pictures from inside the museum.

As a mystery novel, The Seven-per-cent solution is alright - it does discuss go into the city's geography, but never focuses on it.

Come November I will be residing in Vienna for a period of 6 months and I am very excited. I am a big fan of the Anne Fadiman occupation of Reading It There, so my list has become rather expansive. I've based my list on things written specifically about the area and its history or written by people from the area. I've included both fiction and non-fiction alike. Here are a few titles that I've come across.

Beethoven And The Construction of Genius by Tia DeNora

Literature In Vienna At The Turn Of The Centuries by Ernst Grabovszki

Art In Vienna by Peter Vergo

The Austrian Mind by William M. Johnston

Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik

The Fall of the House of Habsburg by Edward Crankshaw

Waldheim and Austria by Richard Bassett

Fin-de-Siecle Vienna by Carl E. Schorske

The Phoenix Land by Miklos Banffy

The Austrians: a Thousand-Year Odyssey by Gordon Brook-Shepherd

A Nervous Splendor by Frederic Morton

Thunder At Twilight by Frederic Morton

The Habsburgs by Andrew Wheatcroft

World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

November is the most gloomy month in Vienna. Quite dreadful and usually rainy and foggy. So I guess you should start with Graham Greene's The Third Man and then take the sewers guided tour (a pair of Wellingtons are useful).

You should also watch Before Sunrise for a more sunny impression of Vienna.

And Amadeus which evokes the Viennese obsession with death (although filmed in Prague which often doubles as Vienna for Americans). Morbides Wien includes the story of Vienna's last executioner who had a side business as a jolly innkeeper. The Vienna Funeral Museum is not to be missed. The city-owned (until recently) funeral services monopoly celebrated its 100th anniversary in the death business which brings me back to the start of November, All Souls Day where all Vienna visits the cemeteries.

Thanks so much for your suggestions, I am very excited about Vienna. The weather you described does not frighten me, I'm from the Pacific Northwest and am quite used to a lot of rain and fog. I don't do very well with extreme colds though.
I am quite familiar with Peter Shaffer's Amadeus but I've not read or seen any of the other titles you've mentioned. Morbides Wien looks very interesting and is going directly at the top of my wishlist - I do not read German though, are there, by chance English (or even Spanish) translations? I'm trying to learn as much German as possible before arriving which wont be a lot as this opportunity only developed about 2 months ago.

If you have any other suggestions, specifically along the lines of dramatic works, plays etc. that I could look at I would greatly appreciate it.

By the way, your library looks fascinating.

Thanks, about Austrian plays, you are lucky in that the best used to be written for music (so translations should be easy to find). Austria's specialty are comedies of errors and tragicomedies (less tragedies such as Grillparzer's stuffy König Ottokars Glück und Ende). See the multitude of comedies of errors by Johann Nestroy such as Der Talisman.

A typical Austrian character is the venting ("granteln") small bourgeois with a healthy appetite enclosed in his cozy prison world but too afraid to leave or rebel (Rebellions never succeed(ed) in Austria.). For starters, Mozart's The Magic Flute with the typical Austrian character Papageno, Johann Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus ("Happy is he who forgets") with its prison guard Frosch. On TV, Helmut Qualtinger's Der Herr Karl or on film Der Bockerer.

A second theme is a very catholic (almost French) attitude to fidelity. See Johann Strauss' operetta Wiener Blut ("Wiener Blut, /Wiener Blut! /Eig'ner Saft, /Voller Kraft, /Du erhebst, /Du belebst /Unser'n Mut!") or Arthur Schnitzler's at the same time shocking and boring Reigen (Schnitzler's Traumnovelle served as a basis for Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.).

In recent times, a main focus has been depressed characters accusing society for their lack of success which can be quite a taxing experience in the theatre, see Thomas Bernhard's Der Theatermacher or 2004 Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek's work. Most accessible: La pianiste (Masochism proper does not belong to Vienna but to Graz, 300 km to the south with Sacher-Masoch.). Vienna can boast of the invention of repression (Sigmund Freud) and the inferiority complex (Alfred Adler), though.

The Chess Machine by Robert Löhr might be interesting. I bought it last fall, but haven't read it yet.

Putting "Vienna" into my list of books read gives me these titles:

627. Vespers in Vienna, by Bruce Marshall (read 25 Sep 1960)
1161. The Siege of Vienna, by John Stoye (read 6 May 1972)
2272. The Reconstruction of Europe: Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna 1814-1815, by Guglielmo Ferrero translated by Theodore R. Jaeckel (read 3 Mar 1990)
2273. The Congress of Vienna A study in Allied Unity:1812-1822, by Harold Nicolson (read 4 Mar 1990)
2526. Fin-de-Siecle Vienna Politics and Culture, by Carl E. Schorske (read 7 Aug 1993) (Pulitzer Nonfiction prize for 1981)
2918. Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914, by Frederic Morton (read 12 Oct 1996)
4082. The Setting of the Pearl Vienna Under Hitler, by Thomas Weyr (read 13 Oct 2005)
4925. A Nervous Splendor Vienna 1888/1889, by Frederic Morton (read 26 May 2012)

I don't know if many people have seen this book, but Oxford University Press have published a collection of stories about Vienna; I've reviewed it. Vienna Tales.