Set in an upper-middle-class household in contemporary Vienna, where life revolves around the arts and the artistically pretentious, Holzfallen (woodcutting) focuses on a dinner party given for an actor of the prestigious Burgtheater. The actor’s late arrival, after the evening’s performance, delays the beginning of the actual meal until past midnight. Up to this midpoint in the novel, the narrator, a writer, observes the empty social chatter and ruminates on his past ties to the people around him from the vantage point of a comfortable chair at the outer edge of the activities. He ponders the circumstances which several days earlier brought him into renewed contact with his host and hostess, the Auersbergers, former friends whom he had abandoned twenty years ago.He learned of the suicide of Joana, a mutual friend from their past, he met the Auersbergers by accident on the street. In a state of emotional confusion, he accepted their invitation to the dinner party—despite the long estrangement and his declared loathing of them.The party itself takes place on the evening following Joana’s burial, almost all the guests still dressed in black.
His failure to refuse the Auersbergers’ invitation becomes a core question that he poses to himself over and over, each time adding associations that gradually accrete to form a larger, more detailed picture of their common past. This past had its roots thirty-five years before, following the narrator’s graduation from the Mozarteum, an academy of music and the arts in Salzburg.With Herr Auersberger accompanying him on the piano, he spent entire afternoons and evenings singing the classical repertories of Italian, German, and English arias and lieder.
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