Twilight and Moonbeam Alley, by Stefan Zweig

 I find that there is something almost cinematic about Stefan Zweig’s writings. He has a talent for creating scenes in the reader’s imagination that draws them in and makes them feel what the characters are feeling. Both stories in this collection deal with despair, loneliness, and the isolation of human beings from each other.

Twilight is about a high ranking lady who has fallen out of favor with the king. She is obliged to leave Versailles to stay at her estate in a sleepy rural town. Accustomed to being the center of attention because of her great influence at court, she never realized that she was just as dependent on the flattery and attention of other people as they were on her for the favors she could grant. After living a life that revolved around creating an outward image for the public to admire, she is not capable of cultivating an interior life, and the scant social life in the little town leaves her no scope for her talents. She begins to contemplate suicide, after throwing a lavish party at her estate to give her society friends the impression that her banishment did not affect her too much. A deceptive appearance, however, does not change the underlying reality. Zweig’s portrayal of this woman’s despair while walking alone by candlelight through the rooms of a dark empty chateau, with only the occasional appearance of a servant to do something for her, is very vivid.

Moonbeam Alley is about a man whose pride and avarice drove his own wife away. Despite his repentance and willingness to reconcile, she prefers to support herself as a prostitute, for independence, and also to humiliate him. The atmosphere of this story is reminiscent of a film noir movie—all dark alleys, seedy tenements, and moody, dimly lighted little bars that are all but impossible to recognize in the daytime, since they only come alive at night.

Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig

This is now one of my favorite of Stefan Zweig's stories.  It's set on a transatlantic ocean liner.  A couple of passengers, the narrator and a competitive Scottish businessman (who is also a chess aficionado), while away the time with a game of chess.  After the narrator loses, he good naturedly tells the businessman that Czentovic, the top chess grand master is on board ship.  Unable to resist a good game, the businessman organizes a match between Czentovic and all the other passengers.  A mysterious stranger shows up who seems to be a chess genius, giving the passengers' side a realistic chance of winning.  We learn Czentovic's life story, as well as that of the mysterious stranger, who are just about as opposite to one another as it is possible to be, and the chess game becomes something  of a duel between the two men and all each stands for.

This was one of Zweig's last stories, and it was published posthumously, after he and his wife committed suicide in Brazil.  One can't help but regret how deep his despair must have been, and how much additional good work he could have done if he hadn't succumbed to it.

Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig

This was a very detailed psychological novel about Lieutenant Hofmiller, a soldier who upsets Edith, a young lame girl by asking her to dance at a ball, as he was unaware of her disability. Unwilling to hurt anyone and wishing to do good, he befriends the family, becomes a regular visitor at their house, and allows them to depend more and more on him until he feels obligated to fulfill their expectations. On the other hand, Edith, used to being the center of attention as the only child of wealthy parents, is unable to accept reality full-time. She swings between elation from living in a fantasy world where her condition is curable and where she can look forward to living life as an able bodied woman, and severe depression when she faces reality and can't accept it. The whole household (and soon, Hofmiller too) has made it their primary concern to keep her as much as possible in her fantasy world. There are two other similar couples in the story with which we can contrast the main couple, both of whom married at least in part due to pity on the part of the husband toward the wife: Edith's parents (her father is a self-made millionaire who made his fortune by taking financial advantage of her mother, whom he then felt obligated to marry) and her doctor and his blind wife. Both made successes of their marriages, as compared to Edith and Hofmiller, whose engagement ends in tragedy on the eve of World War I.

Incident on Lake Geneva, by Stefan Zweig

As I see it, An Incident on Lake Geneva is a short story about the increasing incomprehensibility of the modern world, particularly during wartime, and how alien it has become to man’s nature.

 One day, during World War II, a fisherman on Lake Geneva picks up a nearly naked man floating about in the water on a homemade raft.  The man can’t speak any language that the fisherman knows, so when he gets to shore (causing a sensation because of the man’s unusual appearance) he takes the man to the local authorities and they find a hotel owner who can speak Russian, the only language the fugitive speaks.   It turns out the man is a Siberian peasant from the very beautiful, very isolated region of Lake Baikal.  He was conscripted into the Red Army, fought in the war, was taken prisoner, then escaped.  All he wants is to get home to his wife and children, so he has been slowly making his way back as best he can.  Because the war is still going on, the Swiss hotel owner and the authorities offer him lodging at a local inn, saying he can’t go back yet because the war is still on.  The man can’t seem to understand why he can’t do something so natural as to go home, and his anxiety over his family’s well-being and despair of ever seeing them again get the better of him.

It's a very short story, so the characters and plot are not as complex as in the other Zweig stories I've read, but it's a moving description of a situation that illustrates a larger truth.

Journey into the Past, by Stefan Zweig

Zweig again displays his talent for coming up with interesting situations, realistic characters, and psychological insight in this short story about a young man at the start of a promising career who falls in love with his boss's wife, and then is separated from her due to being transferred overseas for much longer than expected because of World War I.  Will they be able to pick up where they left off, or not? 

Confusion, by Stefan Zweig

I was in the mood for a mystery story of some kind, and this short novel hit the spot.  In it, an elderly literature professor reminisces about his youth--about his upbringing as the son of a schoolmaster in a country town, the initially rocky start to his college career in Berlin, where, like so many students in our days too, he neglects his studies and falls into a dissipated lifestyle, and how he transferred to a university in a smaller town with fewer distractions and met the professor whose passion about Elizabethan literature inspired his own career.

There is a mystery about this professor, whose brilliant lectures about his subject on some days alternate with humdrum, ordinary teaching on others, and his lack of major publications.  Then there's his unlikely choice of wife, an athletic woman much younger than himself who shares none of his scholarly interests or habits and whose relationship to her husband seems strangely detached.  Add to that a habit of sudden, unexplained absences for days at a time, when even his wife has no idea where he is, and erratic behavior, when he alternates between obvious enjoyment of teaching and working on his book with his student and brusque dismissal, and you can see why the student is confused and becomes determined to figure out what's going on.

Fear by Stefan Zweig

Irene is a beautiful, self-centered, spoiled woman, the wife of a wealthy lawyer who takes everything for granted.  From childhood, she has lived the kind of life where everything has been handed to her on a silver platter.  She decides to indulge in an extramarital affair with a poor musician, which leads to blackmail.  It's a new experience for her, as this is a difficulty she must handle all on her own or risk losing everything she has--husband, children, luxurious lifestyle, social standing, all of which she only learns to appreciate when threatened with losing them.

Very entertaining story of a woman who gets her comeuppance with an unexpected twist at the end.  As always, Stefan Zweig displays his talent for creating realistic characters and interesting plots.

Apparently there's a Roberto Rossellini movie made in the 1950's based on this novella called <i>La Paura</i> starring Ingrid Bergman, which I'd love to see if I can find it.

Leporella

This novella is about a simple minded, hardworking, thrifty domestic servant named Crescenza, nicknamed Leporella after an operatic character by one of her employer's girlfriends.  Used to keeping her head down, working hard, minding her own business, and not expecting anything good from anyone, she becomes the housekeeper of an aristocratic married couple, where the husband earns her loyalty (and perhaps her love too), by being charming and considerate towards her.  This man finds his marriage, and his wife, unpleasant, so he embarks on a series of secret affairs whenever he gets the chance.  In her devotion to him and growing hatred for his wife, Leporella does what she can to cover for him and facilitate his happiness.  Eventually the husband finds out just how fiercely loyal she can be, and that's what destroys her.

As with other novellas and short stories of Stefan Zweig's, this one shows his talent for creating strong characters, interesting situations, and psychological insight.

Burning Secret

This is a brilliant short novel told through the eyes of a young boy, Edgar, who is on holiday with his mother at a resort.  A baron, who is a fellow guest at the hotel takes a fancy to his mother, and befriends Edgar in order to try to seduce her.  Edgar, well used to being dismissed and treated like a child by adults, is flattered that such a distinguished man would take the trouble to make friends and spend time with him as if he were an equal.  He learns a hard lesson when he realizes that the baron had an ulterior motive.  Edgar's mother also learns hard lessons when she weighs her marriage and her obligations to her family against the temptation to carry on an affair with an attractive stranger.

Amok, Star Above the Forest

I rank Amok up there with The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel, my favorite Stefan Zweig stories.  As in many of his other stories, it is told second hand, through the eyes of someone who met one of the protagonists, from whom he heard it.  This tends to keep the reader at a distance from the events, as if we were being told a legend.  It's the story of a doctor who takes a job at a colonial outpost.  He falls in love with a proud, aristocratic married woman who comes to him for a secret abortion, which he won't give her, not because it is immoral, but because her demeanor was too haughty for his tastes.  He changes his mind, goes into the city in search of her, but in her desperation she had already decided on a more dangerous remedy.

It's a tragic story about those who repent too late, those whose devotion fails the people to whom they are devoted, and those who get themselves into knotty situations that they try to cover up, when a little more strength of character would have enabled them to either resolve the problem in a more honest way or avoid it altogether.

This collection also has Leporella, which I had read before, and Star Above the Forest,  a beautiful but also tragic story about hopeless, one sided love across barriers of social class that leads to despair. Obviously, this is not the book for you if you are looking for happy endings!

Twenty Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, by Stefan Zweig

A man staying at a country hotel defends the actions of a married woman also staying in the hotel who decides to run away with a younger man, abandoning her husband and children.  His defense of the woman's folly prompts a respectable elderly widow to confess a similar incident in her own past.

Like other Stefan Zweig stories I have read, this one features a story told within a story, with interesting characters, psychological insights, and unusual situations.  Well worth a read.  The atmosphere and subject matter is very similar to Dostoyevsky's <i>The Gambler</i>.

Buchmendel and The Invisible Collection, by Stefan Zweig

These two are my favorite Stefan Zweig stories so far, though admittedly I have not yet read all that many.

Both stories share the theme of the fragility and complexity of civilization.  Building something worthwhile takes hard painstaking work, while destroying something is easy. In the <i>Invisible Collection</i>, a great art collection accumulated over decades is hollowed out within a few years in such a way that its owner is unaware that it has become worthless.  In <i>Buchmendel</i>, a highly specialized talent is destroyed, and those who might have appreciated it, dispersed or dead, so that no one but the narrator and an elderly cleaning woman are even aware that anything was destroyed.  Also, in both stories, the heavy hand of the state plays a big role in the destruction, with the hyperinflation that forced the man's formerly well off family to sell the collection, and the bureaucracy that trapped Mendel.

These are still very relevant ideas, not only for Stefan Zweig's time but for ours too.  I can think of many areas of modern life where the fake is passed off as the real thing, where one thing is pronounced the same or as good as another, when it's clearly not, where fine but important distinctions are not recognized, and where barbarism is allowed to progress, whether by deliberate design, through ignorance, or sometimes through outright hostility towards what others have accomplished.

Letter from an Unknown Woman, by Stefan Zweig

I first became interested in this story and its author when I watched Max Ophuls's excellent 1940's film adaptation of it starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan.

It's the story of a young woman who falls in love at age 13 with a well known 25 year old writer who lives in her building. She idolizes him to the extent that he becomes the sole focus of her life, but he barely even notices her and is known to bring home a series of different women to spend the night. Once she is grown up enough to attract him, they have a few encounters together resulting in a child, but he doesn't remember her after any significant absence. Not wanting to be a burden to him she never tells him about the child and basically sacrifices her entire life to her quiet obsession with him.

It's a very mysterious little story as it is told entirely from her point of view (he is reading a letter she wrote him that was delivered after her death) and there is something a bit surrealistic about the premise that the man just can't remember her even after their affair. Although to be fair, she never tells him her name and falls in with his desires just like anyone else in the long string of women he takes home, so why would he remember her?

The story can be read as a warning about the dangers of idolizing unworthy things, and also about what a lot a person can miss when they go through life being too self centered and not seeing others for the fellow human beings they are.