Conspirators [antikvár]

Crossing into middle age, a successful writer is expected to enter his custodial phase, in which he services and maintains his prior accomplishments. Is that really what he was agreeing to now? The thought vexed Alexander too much for him to continue answering either of the letters lying open on his desk, so he got up from his chair by the window to stretch his legs, certain that at this hour he could walk down to the lake without meeting anyone. Initially, Alexander had been flattered by his publisher's suggestion that this might be a good time to reissue all of his early works. He could easily visualize them displayed in a bookstore window, boxed together in one of those solemn-looking, uniform editions that middle-class Viennese households always seemed ready to buy, even when money was scarce. It was the closest such families could come to the rows of sumptuous, privately bound leather volumes, decorated with the family crest, that they were able to admire in the libraries of the nobihty, now that former Imperial palaces like Schonbrunn had been opened to the public. Clearly, almost a decade as a republic had done nothing to diminish people's fascination with the Habsburgs. Quite the contrary: Images of the Emperor Franz Josef and his bride were even more prevalent than during their lifetimes, used to peddle everything from boxes of chocolate to tickets for an outdoor concert. A citizen could be excused for believing that nothing of interest had occurred since the end of their reign. The traffic in imperial nostalgia was one of the country's few stable industries, surviving every economic crisis, and for the better-off purchasers with aspirations to advanced taste, one of Klimt's erotic sketches, a Josef Hoffmann rocking chair, or a piece of Wiener Werkstatte jewelry fed the same nostalgia for lost glamour as the formulaic picture postcards of the Imperial family did