Don Juan de la Mancha by Robert Menasse
Alma Books, 270pp, £8.99

Have you ever read Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities? If so, you will enjoy Robert Menasse, a contemporary Austrian novelist who shares more than just the same initials with Musil. Menasse is a miniaturist who does not attempt to write on a Proustian scale, but he, too, has a gift for ironical observation and merciless mockery. Indeed, to judge from his latest novel, not much has changed in Vienna since Musil's day. Menasse's hero, Nathan, a melancholy magazine editor, spends most of his time hanging around in cafés, seducing or being seduced by a harem of more or less fatal femmes.

The trouble with this Viennese Venusberg is that poor Nathan is suffering from a seemingly terminal lack of desire, which prevents him enjoying his sybaritic life and for which even his formidable psychoanalyst Hannah can find no cure. In his dealings with women, Nathan is at once Don Juan and Don Quixote: outrageously cynical and idealistic to the point of lunacy. What he really craves, of course, is the tenderness he never received as a child from either parent. But Menasse debunks the Freudian fixation on infancy too: nothing is spared his scathing satire.

It is true that Menasse's novel has no political and cultural hinterland of the kind that makes Musil so memorable. But then today's Vienna is, alas, only a shadow of its Habsburg glory days. And how many readers have finished all three volumes of The Man Without Qualities? There is no such problem with Menasse, who tells you all you need to know about the hollow men of modern Vienna in a couple of hundred pages. One health warning: this is not a book to give as a present to a lady on whom you have romantic designs - unless, that is, you don't mind her seeing through you.
Daniel Johnson