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:
“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)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“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)