Austrian Dreams

Austrian Dreams RHAPSODY--Arthur Schnitzler-- Simon & Schuster ($1.50). What chances one misses at a ball! At the whole carnival of life! How dreamlike actual existence becomes how real our dreams, if the imagination is allowed to play over them sentimentally! So muses wistful Author Schnitzler. Being a Viennese, either with less than the usual inhibitions or more than the normal interest in sex, Author Schnitzler supplies his characters with chances and dreams of a strictly erotic nature. A doctor's wife, after a ball, confesses to him how very close she came, one summer at the seashore, to having an affair with a handsome Pole. The doctor confesses a similar experience, but harbors vindictiveness towards his wife. That night he lets himself in for an extensive series of sex frustrations culminating in his ejection at dawn from an aristocratic club of masked carnalists. When he returns, his wife relates a dream she has had wherein she was anything but frustrated and in which without remorse, she saw him crucified. Vexed, he spends another evening trying to capture his waking dream, to make it come true, but the trail only leads him to an impersonal female corpse in a hospital cellar. He tells his wife all about that, too. They finally agree that you cannot grasp all the truth, all the reality, of any experience, waking or dreaming. . . . People have not only patience but gratitude and admiration for Author Schnitzler's evanescent themes, because he writes, like so many cultured neurotics, beautifully.