bookavore:

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig was the April pick for WORD’s Classics Book Group and it was probably the first one that has been well-liked by the whole group (aside from the introduction, which was not liked at all. If you read this book, skip the intro). It’s a stunningly compact book that skips neatly to the heart of the horrors of war, all the while disguised as a vacation story and spy thriller. It reminded me a lot of Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, but has much more of a le Carre feel. If I were a high school teacher, I’d assign it to my students; it’s quick, engaging, and does an incredible job of humanizing history.

As an aside, this continues to be the best-attended year of Classics Book Group since it was founded, I would guess because we are reading nice short novellas all year. Usually we have a great turnout for the first one and then it trails off, but this year we’re staying robust. If you have guilt about not being able to keep up with a book group, this might be the one for you. For May, we are reading The Old Maid, by Edith Wharton.

Ex libris Stefan Zweig
From the collection of the Jewish Museum, London
Bookplate by Ephraim Moses Lilien (read more about him at John Coulthart’s blog)

Stefan Zweig in The New Yorker

Leo Carey has written the “A Critic at Large” piece in the current issue of The New Yorker about Stefan Zweig, five of whose books we have published: Chess Story, Beware of Pity, The Post-Office Girl, Journey Into the Past, and most recently, Confusion. Here’s Carey on Chess Story, considered one of his best novellas.

In Chess Story a group of men on an ocean liner bound for South America find that a great chess master is abroad and form a team to play him. At first, he easily defeats them; then, during a rematch, a stranger appears and prevents the opponents from making a disastrous move. The stranger takes control and manages to force a draw. Later, he tells the narrator his story: an Austrian lawyer, he was arrested by the Nazis, interrogated, and kept in solitary confinement. To while away the hours, he memorized a compendium of great chess games and played them in his head. He progressed to playing the games against himself, splitting his mind down the middle, the stress of which brought him close to a breakdown. The next day, on the ship, he beats the chess master, but between moves he starts to pace, his steps marking out the dimensions of his former cell. The chess master, noticing that his opponent becomes discomposed when he is forced to wait, exploits this weakness in their second match. As he draws out his moves to unendurable lengths, the stranger appears to enter into a feverish combat with himself.

He finishes his description of the book by writing: “This is melodrama, but of a very high order—the tension of the narrative rising inexorably with the stranger’s gathering psychosis.”

theparisreview:

Few couples have had as complicated and even posthumous a relationship as Friderike Burger and Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish writer who was and continues to be one of the most widely translated German-language authors in the world.

(Source: Tablet Mag)

One more NYRB book club

Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn has a book club called “The Small Press Book Club” led by Michele Filgate (great idea I know, why don’t more bookstores do this?). Last week they discussed the wonderful Near to the Wild Heart by Argentine author Clarice Lispector. And next month, Tuesday, August 14th to be exact, they will discuss Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl, a love story (of sorts) of two disappointed young people living in the wake of the First World War.

If you’re in the area come by!

A quotation from Stefan Zweig’s Confusion

And so it was that the two of us, out of a shared and confused hatred, performed an act that looked like love, but while our bodies sought each other and came together we were both thinking and speaking of him all the time, of nothing but him. Sometimes what she said hurt me, and I was ashamed to be involved with what I disliked. But my body no longer obeyed my will, and instead wildly sought its own pleasure. Shuddering, I kissed the lips which were betraying the person I most loved.

—another quotation from Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, in honor of its publication day. It was reviewed last week in the blog The Mookse and the Gripes, if you are interested read it here.

Publication Day for Stefan Zweig’s Confusion

‘All phenomena, all humanity is to be recognized only in its fiery form, only in passion. For the intellect arises from the blood, thought from passion, passion from enthusiasm—so look at Shakespeare and his kind first, for they alone will make you young people genuinely young! Enthusiasm first, then diligence—enthusiasm giving you the finest, most extreme and greatest tutorial in the world, before you turn to studying the words.’

—from Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, which publishes today. The speech is made by a professor of English language and literature at a university in a provincial German town. His student, the protagonist has spent his first semester philandering in Berlin, and has been sent to a smaller town to dedicate himself to his studies. We also think it’s a pretty good introduction to the themes in all of Zweig’s works.

Not long ago I was given a book by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian, called Beware of Pity which is absolutely magnificent.

   — Roy Hodsgon, new head coach of England’s football/soccer team currently in preparation for Euro Cup 2012 starting next month in Ukraine and Poland. In the United States, ex-Bulls and Lakers coach Phil Jackson was famous for giving his players books. But as far as we know, he never gave any of ours. Can’t quite see Zweig as an inspiration for football glory, but might be well suited for the current England squad.

“I’m thirty years old and eleven of those years have been wasted. I’m thirty and I still don’t know who I am, and still don’t know what it’s all for. I’ve seen nothing but blood and sweat and filth. I’ve done nothing but wait, wait, and wait some more.”

— The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig (via writerinboston)

Travel

If not for the accident of this journey, she herself would have died, rotted away, and turned to dust with no inkling of their glory. She’s been living as though all this didn’t exist, never saw it, hardly cared to; like a fool she dozed of in this tiny little room, hardly longer than her arm, hardly wide enough for her feet, just a night away, a day away from this infinitude, these manifold immensities! Indifferent and without desires before, now she’s beginning to realize what she’s been missing. This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel’s disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel.

— from Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl. In this scene the protagonist Christine is traveling, for the first time, into the Alps to vacation with her aunt.

Happy Birthday Stefan Zweig

Today in 1881 in Ancona, Italy, Stefan Zweig was born. Here’s André Aciman on Zweig from the introduction to Journey into the Past, which we published in 2010 (we will be publishing Confusion in April, 2012).

The word that keeps coming back is fluent. Stefan Zweig was born fluent. Fluent in everything. Everything seems to come easily to him. Born in 1881 into a very wealthy, open-minded, Viennese Jewish family, he lived well and traveled widely; published at a very early age; finished his dissertation at an equally precocious age; acquired unparalleled international fame as a biographer, novelist, playwright, essayist, and librettist; and had a roster of friends and acquaintances so exhaustive that it is difficult to think of any European worthy whose biography would not at one point or another invoke the name Stefan Zweig. He appears everywhere, knows everyone, and is translated into more languages than any of his contemporaries. Just about everything he put his mind to is stamped with telltale ease, polish, and effortless grace of people whose success, literary and otherwise, seemed given from the day they were born or picked up a pen. He never quarreled with his tools; his tools were happy to oblige. He didn’t spend nights searching for the mot juste; the mot juste simply came. Agony was not his style. In his work there is not one trace of difficulty to overcome. Difficulty never came. There is—and one spots it from the very first sentence in almost everything he wrote—an unmistakable lightness of touch that makes him at once solemn and liant, humble and patrician, scholar and raconteur. The irony is seldom overblown, the drama never overstretched, and the psychology, for all its unsparing, disquieting probes into the ‘spiritual upheavals…unknown and unsuspected,’ remains spot-on and mischievously subtle. You won’t hear the lumpish footfalls of over-the-top sorrow or pick up the false accents of fin de siècle melancholia. Zweig is firm and fluent. Everything in its time, everything just right, never a false move, not one sleight of hand. The story almost writes itself, from beginning to end. He’ll stop either when he has nothing more to say or when it’s no longer safe or necessary to go any further.