This strongly recommended volume of a series of literary city guides seeks to provide a rounded view of Vienna. The culture and landscapes are there but the book goes beneath the veneer to give the view of the outsider looking in. Joseph Roth's journalistic pieces describe larger-than-life characters from the 1920s: the boatman on the Danube (The Spring Ship) or Herr Rambousek (Merry-go-round). More modern outsiders are Dimitré Dinev's Bulgarian asylum-seekers, Spas and Ilija (Spas Sleeps). The editors balance stories from the bell-époque era (Arthur Schnitzler and Adalbert Stifter) with ones from the darker 20th century (Eva Menasse and Doron Rabinovici) of a city ravaged by wars and the Nazi atrocities. Oh Happy Eyes is one of the most fascinating stories in the collection, where Miranda, uses her visual impairment to refuse to see the world as it really is – perhaps posing a metaphorical accusation of modern Viennese.
