"Girls, you know you better watch out. Some guys are only about That Thing."
- Lauryn Hill, Doo Wop (That Thing)
In ten amorous dialogues, La Ronde captures the erotic world of fin de siècle Vienna, where prostitutes cavort with counts, wives seduce louche young gentlemen, and husbands cheat with Sweet Young Things. Schnitzler's penetrations into the tangle of sex, love, and power - That Thing - affirm La Ronde as a humanist masterpiece. Today, post-Freud, That Thing is like a particle in quantum physics whose nature eludes every attempt to describe it. Cracking Schnitzler's atom will set off not a nuclear explosion, but a cascade of glittering shrapnel that will reflect the desperation and joy of being human.