The novella All Girls Be Mine Alone by Sophie Strohmeier is told in two stories, each populated by the talented young singers and dancers of various performing arts schools in Vienna. The first story, "Under the Basilisk," is the reminiscence of an unnamed narrator’s junior year in high school. She is often yearning, plagued by inexperience, and uncertainly lesbian. “I had never been with a woman, really been with one—the time I had fingered my childhood best friend on her brother's pull out couch did not count,” she recalls with a clear and frank self-awareness that typifies the entire novella (5-6). So it goes, until Lea erupts into her life. Lea is the beautiful younger lover of Joachim, a handsome, popular boy one year the narrator’s junior. Joachim, despite having a girlfriend he does not love, and sleeping with Lea, who he does love, pursues the narrator, the new girl at school, too. After Joachim breaks things off with his girlfriend, he somewhat mischievously invites both the narrator and Lea to a party. The two meet, and Lea tells the narrator a story about a suicidal nun, after which the two begin to hum Mozart’s deathbed composition, Requiem, in a perfectly high-brow mystical meet cute. The mercurial course of the ensuing love triangle, which briefly involves the narrator becoming a Joachim lookalike golem, composes the majority of Story One. 

In Story Two, “The Birch Trees,” we begin with the same narrator, nineteen and in college now, and fresh off a summer spent yearning desperately after Lara, a straight 32-year-old singer. “I would lay on one side of the couch, and Lara would lay on the other, in her reddish-splotched buxom glory, perpetually soft and exuding droplets of perspiration like a piece of fruit that had been recently taken out of the fridge,” writes the narrator (48), describing her daytime trips to Lara’s, where over wine Lara liked to recount sexual escapades with strange men, a torturous means of flirtation she had no intention of following through on. The narrator shares this state of unrequited lust for an older woman with her good friend Larissa, who lusts for Stasi, a married mother, former singer, and fellow member of the Vienna opera scene.

With her family out of town, Stasi hosts a Mulholland Drive watch party, inviting Larissa and the narrator, her two “misguided, virginal” worshipers (54). Of this early moment in their sexual lives, the narrator recalls, “We had our own illusions of what it would mean to have sex with a woman, based on our understanding of Mulholland Drive, in which sex seemed to be no more than a series of accumulating caresses that grew and ebbed and yearned for an ever-elusive climax, like in Richard Wagner's music” (54). Drinking in Stasi’s apartment, Stasi holds court, telling a tale perfectly designed to provoke Larissa and our horny narrator. Declaring first that she is not a lesbian, Stasi tells the girls of her passionate, mystical love affair with a singer named Tanya. One night Tanya manipulates a Ouija board to accuse Stasi of being the biggest pervert in their dorm. Keeping up the bit, Tanya later accuses Stasi of being in cahoots with the ghost of a Vile Monk haunting their building. This teasing flirtation turned erotic fixation moves from wet dreams to a full-fledged affair, with the novella shifting for 90 pages from first to third person as we dip into Stasi’s tantalizing and delightful tale.

All Girls Be Mine Alone is a masterful work of a major talent. Really, the book is so good. So careful. So precisely written. I often find something extra special about the language and clarity of translated works. It seems more perfect, as if the translator, freed from the burdens of constructing plots, tension, ideas, paragraphs, and characters, gets to unleash the full force of their mind on the words and sentences alone. This book has that feel, though it was written in English. Strohmeier, though she lives in Brooklyn, is a Viennese writer, whose first novel was written and published in German. Perhaps this has something to do with the effect. 

There is a crispness to both stories’ unfolding. It just goes, tells itself, sees no need to justify or over-explain its characters or events. When people have sex in the book it is addressed quickly and somewhat indirectly. Yet it is sexy, like being in a room where a new lover is changing behind a privacy screen. Stasi, in a dream, has a penis: “there was a thickness in her pants that needed out . . . [she] unzipped the bulging pants . . . looked down at it. She could see the veins and folds of skin . . . She woke up feeling so aroused that she felt like it would be painful to walk that morning” (74). That same day, in a reverie in the conservatory bathroom: “[Stasi] knew what it felt like to possess a whole new organ—a, as she called it, phantom thing—and she knew that it was not merely for relieving oneself. It was for doing other things, specifically to women” (75). And there is Tanya, in the bathroom with her, not yet her amor but already an object of desire, whispering in Stasi’s ear, “ ‘Keep it in your pants, dummie,’ ” as if she can see the phantom thing (76).

Later, bathing together, nearing the consummation of their prolonged flirtation, Strohmeier writes, “Tanya seemed even prettier to Stasi. This, Tanya could tell. She unfolded her arms and placed them on the sides of the tub so that Stasi could properly look at her” (130). And two pages later, in Tanya's bunk, “They tried different things until late into the night . . . a miraculous stretch of shifting limbs, sighing, whispering, and changing positions” (132). 

This understated frankness works well when recounting various characters’ unfaithfulness too, rendering infidelity less as taboo than sad happenstance. Infidelity thus does not need to drive the plot. Yearning drives the plot. This in turn gave the book an old feel, like it could have been written decades or a century ago. The quick precision of the writing, the boarding school in Vienna, the nuns, monks, hauntings, possessions, ghosts, golems, and its profusion of classical arts, which inform the emotional and intellectual lives of nearly all of the novella’s characters, all contribute to that old feel. These classical works are referenced, sung, debated, and quoted again and again. In this way they become emotionally accessible to the reader in ways that the classical arts rarely are in contemporary fiction, where they are typically used as markers of class or intellect.

The book’s patterns feel suited to all the classical music too, with its ever building yearnings, its flirtations with the mysterious, mystical, and erotic energies of the world, which are dramatically, satisfyingly, but only ever briefly consummated. Of course this consummation only begets more yearning, as is the way of young love, or lust. And there is also the fact this is all told as a reminiscence, meaning the narrator has left these loves and lusts behind. And so like Tchaikovsky’s opera, Eugene Onegin, which Stasi so adores, we read the story of a “horny teenage girl,” with everything happening “because of her and her crush,” but as Tanya, that crush, explains to Stasi, “it’s not just about romantic fixation but the loss of that fixation . . . Romantic love cannot last. It can never be fulfilled . . . It will only wander to the next source of its fixation” (120).