THE POST OFFICE GIRL
On reading Stefan Zweig
Stefan
Zweig ( 1818-1942)
‘Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright,
journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s
and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world.’ (See
(Wikipaedia)
‘It seems to me a duty to bear witness to our
lifetime, which has been fraught with such dramatic events, for we have all
.....witnessed these vast transformations – we have been forced to witness
them.’ Foreword to his autobigraphy, The World of Yesterday. P.21
A prolific writer
of biographies (e.g Marie Antoinette, Balzac,
Dostoevsky, Dickens), novellas,
short stories and plays, his only two actual novels are Beware of Pity,
published in 1939 and The Post Office Girl, the manuscript of which was
found among his papers after his suicide in 1942 but which was not published
until forty years later, in 1982.
Zweig‘s
original title, Rausch der Verwandlung, roughly translated, means The Intoxication of Transformation. It was given its English title, The Post Office
Girl, when it was translated
from the German by Joel Rotenberg, and in 2009 was shortlisted for The Best Translated Book Award, an American literary award that
recognizes the previous year's best original translation into English. The
award takes into consideration not only the quality of the translation but the
entire package: the work of the original writer, translator, editor, and
publisher. The award is "an opportunity to honour and celebrate the
translators, editors, publishers, and other literary supporters who help make
literature from other cultures available to American readers.”
The question arises: wasThe Post Office Girl completed? In an
Afterword to the English translation, William Deresiewitcz says that Zweig
‘nibbled’ at the book for years and suggests that he may never have hammered
the book into a shape which satisfied him. But, when I read it for the first
time I was unaware of its pre-publication history and accepted the
indeterminate ending as the only possible one the author could have offered:
Christine and Ferdinand’s fate seems as unknowable as our own and I was content
to leave it there.
The significance and interest
of this novel, for me, lies in the way in which the narrative of the
individual’s life and fate is set in the context of historical events in a way
that brings those historical events to life. Of course, in this Zweig is by no
means using an original idea: think Tolstoy, for example, or, nearer to our own
time, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.
But in the analysis of Christine’s personality and experiences (and it must be
remembered that Zweig was a friend and follower of Freud) we get an insight into
the ways in which political and social situation in which she finds herself
limit and determine the direction of her life.
Despite his remarkable
popularity as a writer during the 30s and 40s, Zweig does have (and did have)
his detractors. For example, in a review of Zweigs’ Autobiography,The
World of Yesterday, published in 2010 in The London Review of Books, Michael
Hofmann was unequivocally disparaging about Zweig’s entire
oeuvre, as, it must be noted, were many of his (Zweig’s) contemporaries. On the
other hand, readers’ online comments are almost unanimously admiring and
appreciative.
One of Hofmann’s criticisms with which I will
concur is that Zweig does have a tendency to overwrite: for example,Ferdinand’s
long polemic rants toward the end are unnecessarily protracted, with too much
repetition of the points he has already made quite clearly enough.
For all that, I value this book for its
psychological truth, and, of course, because it’s a compelling read. On second
reading, it still gripped me and also inspired me to look more closely into the
history of Austria before and after the First World War.The World of
Yesterday gives yet more insight into the experiences and fate of Jewish
families, like that of Zweig, who lived through those times.
I first came to Zweig through his other novel,
Beware of Pity, a psychological masterpiece, in my view. The Post
office Girl is another such.
© CME 2016
