You can’t keep a good writer down. In the 1930s the Austrian short-story writer Stefan Zweig was an international best-seller, one of the most widely translated writers in Europe, so successful he could afford to buy Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen. His death in 1942 made the front page of The New York Times, but then he drifted out of print. Over the past two decades there has been a slow resurgence of interest in his work as independent publishers have put out modern editions, winning him new admirers. His writing inspired Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson read the first page of a Zweig novel in a bookshop and thought “OK, this is a new favorite writer of mine”). Now Penguin gives us six of his best stories, essential reading for anyone interested in modern fiction.
“Odd psychological states have a positively disquieting power over me,” says the narrator of one story, Amok. Zweig specializes in tales of passion, obsession and irrationality, particularly in middle-class society, of the heart not just ruling the head but overwhelming it. The sense of emotions at a feverish height never lets up.
At the start of the opening story, The Invisible Collection, an art dealer tells us that “this is just about the strangest experience I have been through in all my thirty-seven years in the business”. The story, written in 1924, is set in the German period of hyperinflation, when people invested in goods rather than valueless money. The delicious conceit is that an art collector has slowly lost his sight, and his family has sold all his precious artworks and replaced them with blank sheets or canvases. The art-dealer narrator, invited to value the collection, must decide whether to tell the man the truth or leave undisturbed the “bliss” in his expression as he touches and “sees” the paintings that are no longer there.
Stefan Zweig specializes in tales of passion, obsession and irrationality.
The stories here include some of Zweig’s best-known tales of anguish and passion. In Leporella an unattractive maid falls in love with her master and comes to believe that he hates his wife as much as she does. In Burning Secret — one of Zweig’s biggest-selling stories in his lifetime — a boy struggles to understand the dynamic between his mother and the “woman-chaser” she is being seduced by. “But what sort of terrible secret must this be, if it drove grown adults so far that they could … sneak away like criminals?”
The longest story here — really a novella — is evidence of the range of Zweig’s abilities. The Buried Candelabrum was written in 1937, when he was living in Ostend with his great friend Joseph Roth. Zweig was an Austrian Jew, and this story, written in exile from the Nazis, speaks to the plight of the Jewish people. It is set in AD455, during the sack of Rome by the invading Vandal army, when a precious menorah, once used by Solomon, is stolen, and the Jewish community vows to get it back.
It’s a mini epic featuring history, politics, a quest, tense conflict and (as ever with Zweig) several surprises before it ends. The menorah represents stability, without which the Jews are destined to “still wander, knowing no peace, from one strange land to another”. Meanwhile, “the ever-indifferent stars shone overhead, easy and untroubled”. The fates of men are nothing to the universe, Zweig tells us ― but he makes us care.
His strength was in the short form, from stories to novellas. He wrote only two novels, Beware of Pity (also reissued by Penguin) and The Post-Office Girl, both worthwhile if inevitably lacking the singular punch of his short works. Critics have compared him variously to Somerset Maugham, John Updike and — inevitably — Anton Chekhov, but none of these comparisons is helpful except that they mean: “Just read him!” For my part I think there’s something of Roald Dahl’s adult stories about his work: they have the same intensity and archetypal quality, like the best story you ever overheard in the pub.
The fates of men are nothing to the universe, Zweig tells us ― but he makes us care.
Not everyone admires Zweig’s work. In 2010 the esteemed translator Michael Hofmann took a hatchet to his burgeoning reputation in the London Review of Books, calling Zweig a “Kitschmeister” and “the Pepsi of Austrian writing”. But this seems to miss the point. Zweig’s stories are melodramatic, certainly, but the high drama is an essential means of immersing the reader, as is the way he takes his time.
His dispatches from tempestuous spirits could not be told more briefly or plainly without losing their cumulative power. The stories are light reading on dark subjects, and above all a great deal of fun. His memoir The World of Yesterday, completed shortly before his suicide, concludes with the words: “Every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.” That is exactly what you get with his books.
The six stories here are perfect, but they are not enough. If you want more, try the two chunky volumes Collected Stories and Collected Novellas from Pushkin Press. They contain most of the stories here and many more, including some of my favorites: Confusion, Twilight and Chess Story. “The fancies of fiction,” Zweig wrote in The Fowler Snared, “do they not fade after a time, do they not perish in twenty, fifty or a hundred years?” Not if they’re this good, they don’t.
John Self is a Belfast-based writer
