Then there are the wild swings in tone, tumbling from Reitter’s studied explication of the politics of the fin-de-siècle Vienna theatre scene to Franzen telling us about trying to get his end away on his gap year in Berlin. I’m not sure how patient the serious Kraus reader is going to be with Franzen when he starts talking about how he used to think of his “Id” as “some hot, sexual, powerful toadlike thing inside me”. Nor, I suspect, will the Franzen fan be all that compelled by the trickiness of translating voraussetzungslosigkeit.