Reception
Broch often criticised the era of 1880 until 1918. He found another chance to do so in his book of essays Hofmannsthal and His Time (Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit) criticising fin-de-siecle culture in Vienna which he felt was represented by kitsch and fussiness. He created his own term, "the gay apocalypse", to describe this period.
The Sleepwalkers is among the Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera´s favorite novels. He dedicated a chapter of his essay The Art of the Novel (L´Art du roman) to interpreting the novel, upon which he asks his companion, perhaps with an ironic tone: "Who is reading The Sleepwalkers?".
The novel is also mentioned in Michelangelo Antonioni's La notte where the protagonist played by Marcello Mastroianni (within the film a respected novelist) finds the book lying around the mansion where a party is being held.
Read more about this topic: The Sleepwalkers (Broch)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)