Lieutenant Gustl

The Times Square new year celebration was boring and disappointing but I more than made up for it by finishing this absolutely brilliant German story by Arthur Schnitzler in the train. The story is hardly forty pages long but Schnitzler packs so much into it and his psychological insights are so sharp and revealing that reading the story feels more like watching an xray of the hero's mind.

This is a good overview of the story. And this has some nice infomative notes on it. It is generally considered to be one of the earliest examples of the use of interior monologue or "stream of consciouness" in fiction... I was very impressed. Now I want to look for the story that was the basis of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.