1 h 40 minAudiobook10 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does love become when desire leaves no room for anything else?
Hans Kaltneker’s Love is a dark romance of obsession, sacrifice and ruin in the Vienna of the late Habsburg age. Cafés, theatres and music form a polished setting, while strict social rules stand against a hunger for feeling that manners cannot satisfy.
At its heart lies a difficult question: how much can love demand before giving becomes self-destruction? Kaltneker’s intense, feverish writing explores passion and its price. Here, love offers no promise of comfort, and the costs of feeling cannot simply be undone.
What you’ll discover
- Vienna behind the polish Enter a world where social rules meet secrecy, anxiety and an unsatisfied hunger for feeling.
- Desire at its darkest Explore obsession as a force that narrows life around a single consuming desire.
- The demands of sacrifice Consider where devotion ends and the surrender of comfort, reputation or self becomes harm.
- Passion with lasting costs Face a dark vision of love in which feeling carries consequences that cannot be undone.
- Emotion without easy comfort Meet Kaltneker’s feverish intensity in a romance that brings desire and ruin into close company.
Who will love it
Readers who love intense, poetic fiction about love pushed to its limit, who are drawn to Vienna before the Great War, and who enjoy stories where passion meets questions of sacrifice, guilt and grace.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A night of vows and a dead dog
- A marriage bought on strange terms
- The Sad One preaches the last sacrifice
- Slander, a husband's visit, and a death
- A fortune thrown away to ruin her
- Trial, prison, and a brothel waiting
- What the novel is really about, and how it speaks
Who’s who
- SecundusA Viennese prince with a vast fortune, he loves one woman so wildly that he sets out to destroy her and himself.
- Kathrin NhiliusA beautiful, married society woman who is the beloved of Secundus, and who believes that love must be tested by suffering.
- The Sad OneA fallen angel with the face of Dante, who visits Secundus at night and teaches him the last stage of sacrificial love.
- SabineA cold, proud young aristocrat who agrees to a loveless marriage with Secundus in exchange for wealth and status.
- Baron NhiliusA fat, gentle businessman with a weak heart, who tries to settle matters with Secundus without a duel.
- FantoSecundus's shrewd and loyal financial manager, who carries out the schemes of ruin though he sees where they lead.
- Madame Adèle OstererA powerful keeper of Vienna's finest brothel, who accepts a large payment to bring the Baroness under her roof.
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- Audiobook
- 1 h 40 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
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- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Read and hear Love in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Love
A prince with thirty million wrecks the woman he adores, while a dark angel calls it love.
Medium levelUnder 2 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Love is a short novel by the Austrian writer Hans Kaltneker, who died in 1919. It is set among the palaces, bars and courtrooms of Vienna in the years before the First World War.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A night of vows and a dead dog
The book begins in a bedroom at night. A man and a woman say they love each other and speak as if they have been searching for each other all their lives. The woman tells him how she waited for years, and how she once walked barefoot across a cold floor so that God and her unknown beloved might notice the small sacrifice. She is married to another man, and she confesses that she once loved dresses, hunting, concerts and her dog.
Their joy is so great that the man wants to die in it at once. She says no, because that would be too small for them. They have not yet suffered through each other, and she senses that the world cannot stay balanced until they have. He brushes this fear aside and plans a future of journeys to India, Java and Japan, and even a life of piracy in the South Seas.
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What is Love by Hans Kaltneker about?
It tells of Prince Secundus, who loves a married woman, Kathrin Nhilius, and then sets out to ruin her and himself, believing that the highest love must be willing to be hated and to give up grace.
Who is the Sad One in Love?
He is a dark angel with Dante's face who visits Secundus at night. He claims to be both a fallen brother and the hero's own soul, and he teaches him a stern creed of sacrifice.
What does the epigraph from Meister Eckhart mean?
Eckhart, a medieval preacher, says love as strong as death goes past all comfort and even past hope of eternal life. The Sad One retells this idea to Secundus as a plan for his own actions.
The author
Hans Kaltneker
1895–1919 · Austrian poet and playwright
Hans Kaltneker was an Austrian writer who wrote poetry, plays and prose in the early twentieth century. He was born in 1895 in Temesvár, then in Austria-Hungary and now Timișoara, Romania. He died of tuberculosis in Gutenstein, Austria, in 1919, at the age of twenty-four.
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