Mysteries of Vienna

I have been in Vienna only three times in my life, each time for a few days, but my visits have left me with an impression of it as an easy city to get to know, not especially mysterious. It has a well defined city center (the Innere Stadt) and nearly all the major attractions and landmarks (other than the large parks and palaces, such as the Prater, Belvedere and Schönbrunn) are in it or just outside it. At least as regards the city as it has developed since the end of the  Allied occupation (1955), it doesn’t seem to have the kind of seedy underbelly — a great setting for crime fiction — that such cities as London, Paris, Barcelona or Edinburgh have. The Vienna of The Third Man has given way to one that recently has been consistently ranked among the most livable and most prosperous cities in the world.

It is therefore fitting that the series of Vienna-based mystery novels that I have recently been reading has as its locations not dark alleys, slums or Bohemian hangouts, but the best-known tourist attractions of Vienna. The author is Beate Maxian, who besides writing novels is a print, radio and television journalist. The principal crime-solver in the series is, not surprisingly, a young, attractive woman journalist named Sarah Pauli.

The first novel in this series (Maxian had written some crime novels before it) is Tödliches (deadly) Rendezvous (2011); in it the mid-twentyish Sarah, who lives with her younger brother Chris (a medical student/bartender/irresistible seducer of women) since their parents died in a car accident, gets a job as a freelance intern at a (fictitious) major newspaper, the Wiener Bote. She is assigned to assist the prestigious muckraking reporter Hilde Jahn, who is murdered in the course of her investigation. Sarah then takes it over and solves the case, not before almost getting murdered as well. When she gets a permanent job at the paper, it is not as an investigative journalist but as a columnist writing about superstitions, folk beliefs and the like, something she is an expert on (besides being slightly superstitious as well). She also develops a crush on the paper’s publisher, the handsome David Gruber, who had been Hilde Jahn’s lover. The central setting here is the Steinhof hospital, with its famous church built by Otto Wagner.

All the subsequent novels in the series have the landmark location in the title: Die Tote vom (The Dead Woman of the) Naschmarkt (2012); Tod hinter dem (Death Behind the) Stephansdom (2013); Der Tote vom (The Dead Man of the) Zentralfriedhof (2014); Tod in der (Death in the) Hofburg (2015).

The last one mentioned happens to be the first one that I read; I picked it up last April at a bookstore in the Vienna Central Station so that I would have something to read during the four-hour train ride to Prague. By this time Sarah and David are committed lovers (though there is still no mention of marriage), and Chris, instead of bringing a different girl home every night, is in a more-or-less steady relationship with Sarah’s best friend Gabi, a secretary at the paper.

It’s in the preceding one that we learn, from the point of view of one of the criminals (who means to possess her before killing her), that Sarah is quite a desirable woman, with a lovely face framed by dark hair and her usual outfit of jeans and T-shirt covering a slim, shapely body. For she is quite unassuming, using a minimum of makeup and detesting high heels, and during the first stages of her infatuation with David she is unsure of her attractiveness.

I am currently waiting for the following volume, Mord (Murder) in Schönbrunn (2016). The latest one, Die Prater-Morde, has just come out, and I am looking forward to it as well. For I have become addicted to the doings of Sarah Pauli and her companions — not to mention the variegated local color of Vienna — as I am to those of Peter Robinson’s Alan Banks and his Yorkshire, and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch and his Los Angeles.

Unfortunately — not for me but for others — the books are available only in the original German (in a Viennese variant). As I have been reading them I have found myself half-consciously translating them into English in my head. I have even flirted with the idea of writing Frau Maxian with a proposal to actually do so. I have done a bit of translating in my life, but I don’t think I have the time or stamina to do any more of it. But to any German-readers out there who don’t yet know her work: Gutes Lesen!

 

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Spanish names, again

 

A number of years ago — in 2000 — I wrote an essay about Spanish names, concerned with the misunderstanding of Spanish naming customs often shown by non-Hispanic writers. This post is about something else: the names that Spanish soccer players are known by.

It’s well known by soccer fans that Brazilian players are almost never called by their full names or surnames. At the moment, the only ones I can think of who is at least partially so known are Dani Alves (his full name is actually Daniel Alves da Silva), Coutinho (actually Philippe Coutinho Correia), Casemiro (Carlos Henrique José Francisco Venâncio Casimiro) and Thiago Silva (Thiago Emiliano da Silva). The others are usually known either by a forename — which may double, like David Luiz or Roberto Carlos, or a diminutive, like Rafinha or Ronaldinho — or by a nickname (Pelé, Bebeto, Tostão, Garrincha, Kaká). What I mean by “known by” is the name printed on the jerseys and normally referred to by game commentators.

With Hispanic players (both Spanish and Hispano-American) the pracice varies. But what’s fairly consistent is that when a player’s surname is one of one of the common –ez names then he will use only the forename or a nickname: Raúl (González), Míchel (José Miguel González), Chicharito (Javier Hernández), Xavi (Xavier Hernández), Pedro (Rodríguez), James (Rodríguez), Alexis (Sánchez), and many others.

Occasionally a player with a not-so-common surname will also choose to be known by a nickname: Joselu (José Luis Sanmartín), Koke (Jorge Resurrección Merodio), Isco (Francisco Román Alarcón), or else by a forename, like Adrián (San Miguel). Sergi Busquets has “Sergio” on his jersey but he is generally known as Busquets.

But for some reason, the  Spanish-named players in the first category who play in England don’t have their name choice respected by British sportscasters, with a few exceptions. Pedro is usually called Pedro, but Chicharito is almost invariably Javier (usually mispronounced) Hernández, Alexis is Sánchez, Ayoze is Pérez, Sandro is Ramírez. I wish I understood why this is so.

My two cents’ worth

Before the Great Recession hit, in 2008, I dabbled in the stock market. Not very successfully: I though I had scored a coup when I sold Netflix in 2007 after a 15% gain (my stock would have appreciated forty-fold if I still had it). But I thought I would try — nearly everyone did.

Once I realized that the financial advisers to whom I had been paying a fee, win or lose, did not provide any more wisdom than tossing a coin, I decided to do my investing online, and I opened an account at Charles Schwab. When I got rid of the stock I had held (mostly at a loss) I opened what was billed as a “high-yield” savings account. The label stuck to the account as the yield dropped. Meanwhile I noticed that there were online banks paying considerably higher interest. So I closed my Schwab accounts, or thought that I had.

It turned out that, at the time I closed the accounts, there was some accrued interest that had not yet been paid into the account. The amount? $0.02. Yes, two cents. And I received a check for that amount.

I didn’t bother depositing the check but kept it around as a novelty. I didn’t think it would matter.

But matter it did. Since the check had not been cashed in 180 days, I received a letter telling me that it had expired, and, in a separate envelope, another check.

In the interest of not wasting paper and ink, I will deposit this one.

GOT and me

Not a day seems to go by without some news item about the phenomenon known as Game of Thrones, whether it’s about its plot, its fans, its cast members, or a comparison of some person with one of its characters.

I don’t watch GOT. I did, briefly, during the first season, because I had access to HBO as part of a temporary subscription package (my real interest was in a show airing on Showtime at the time, The Borgias). But I lost interest when I realized that I had been watching it under a misapprehension.

This had happened before, as I have written: In 2001 I watched 24, falsely believing to be a Canadian satire on American paranoia in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

As to Game of Thrones, it seemed to me that it was historical fiction set in Britain around the 6th century, when Anglo-Saxons and Britons coexisted. I based this belief on settings clearly reminiscent of the early Middle Ages, with no apparent signs of Christianity, and on the mix of Germanic-sounding and Celtic-sounding names. There were also references to seven kingdoms (the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy?), the northern wall (Hadrian’s?) and the wild people of the north (Scots and Picts?).

But I was lost once the Dothraki showed up. It gradually struck me that what I was watching was unmitigated fantasy. I like fantasy, if it’s rigorous (I’ll explain that some other time), but this was not. And so I let the subscription lapse once the first season of The Borgias was finished. And even when I renewed it, twice, for the second and third, HBO did not tempt me.