One of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Toby Litt, author of Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself and Ghost Story brings us a monthly selection on cult literature.

This month features: Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler
Published by: Penguin Modern Classic
ISBN: 071453062X
Price: £7.99

Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Frederic Raphael, and most of all Stanley Kubrick - j'accuse!

I accuse you of committing gross aesthetic crimes against a small but perfectly formed novel! I accuse you of creating a bloated and tedious essay from an elegantly perverse caprice! I accuse you of anti-alchemy - of turning glistening fictional gold into steaming cinematic turd!

Cast and crew of Eyes Wide Shut, I want those one hundred and fifty nine minutes back! All of them! And now I've got that out of my system...

Originally published in 1926 as Traumnovelle, Dream Story concerns the truth of a marriage. Fridolin and Albertine are a reasonably affluent and decently respectable Viennese couple. He is a doctor, she devotes herself to their beautiful six-year-old daughter.

The story takes place over three nights and days. At the beginning of the first night, after their daughter has gone to bed, Fridolin and Albertine discuss a masked ball they attended the evening before.

'Innocent yet ominous questions and vague ambiguous answers passed to and fro between them; and as neither of them doubted the other's absolute candour, both felt the need for mild revenge... Yet this light banter about the trivial adventures of the previous night led to more serious discussion of those hidden, scarcely admitted desires which are apt to raise dark and perilous storms even in the purest, most transparent soul; and they talked about those secret regions for which they felt hardly any longing, yet towards which the irrational winds of fate might one day drive them.'

It comes out that both of them, holidaying the previous summer on the Danish Coast, were tempted by other people. For Albertine, it was a young man with a yellow suitcase: 'Were he to summon me - or so I believed - I wouldn't have been able to resist.' For Fridolin, it was a girl of no more than fifteen: 'Even I don't know,' he says, 'how things might have developed under other circumstances.' They are interrupted by the maid, calling the doctor to the bedside of a very sick patient. He goes - and so begins his attempt at 'mild' revenge.

'Perhaps there are times, or nights, he thought, when some strange irresistible magic does emanate from men who under normal circumstances are not imbued with any particular power over the opposite sex?'

Fridolin, in a fairytale atmosphere, is tempted by a series of women: a virgin engaged to be married, an ailing street prostitute, a depraved little girl pimped by her father. Along the way, he has bumped into Nachtigall, an old friend who earns a living as a pianist. That night, Nachtigall is playing for most unusual clientèle. 'Tell me more. Now you've started? Secret shows? Closed societies? Invited guests?' The pianist drops hints: a masked ball, naked women, a password... Fridolin persuades Nachtigall to tell him the password, to give him time to hire a costume, to let him follow his coach to wherever the masked ball is taking place. This, Fridolin thinks, will be the perfect revenge upon Albertine. But maybe not so 'mild', after all.

The password 'Denmark' gets him into the ball, but thereafter he has no idea what to do or how to behave. One of the masked women, disguised as a nun, takes pity on him: 'There's still time for you to leave. You don't belong here. If they were to discover you, you'd be in serious trouble.' In his vanity, his innocence, and in his attraction to the mysterious woman, Fridolin refuses to leave. Almost immediately, he is discovered. But not before he witnesses the beginnings of what Stanley Kubrick turned into perhaps the least erotic orgy in cinema history. The revellers surround Fridolin and demand he unmask himself. He refuses, and his life is at stake. But now steps forward the masked woman who tried to persuade him to leave. 'I'm willing to redeem him,' she says. He refuses to accept her self-sacrifice; he will reveal himself voluntarily. 'Beware! the nun cried out, 'you would destroy yourself without saving me! Go!' And, turning to the others, 'Here I am, at your disposal - all of you!'

Fridolin spends the second half of the novel trying to track down the woman who so offered herself up to - what? That, too, he needs to discover.

Schnitzler's Dream Story is swift, dark, comic and beautifully perverse - everything Eyes Wide Shut wasn't.