SOURCE: Review of Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by Margaret Schaefer. Kirkus Reviews (1 November 2001): 1511.

In the following review, the anonymous reviewer praises Dream Story for its masterful blend of realism and dream.

One of the most distinctive and compelling voices of the early modernist movement is heard again in this elegant collection of nine urbane, perversely comic, deeply disturbing stories [Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas]. The Austrian Schnitzler (1862-1931), who is perhaps better known for his equally incisive plays (including The Merry-Go-Round and The Green Cockatoo), was a practicing physician whose austere, clinical studies of sexual obsession and abnormal psychology won the admiration of his countryman Sigmund Freud and compare favorably with the intense, exploratory fiction of Svevo, Musil, Bernanos, and Moravia. Schnitzler's mastery of the technique of interior monologue is brilliantly demonstrated by such deftly structured contes as “The...