By Stefan Zweig (Trans: Anthea Bell)
Pushkin Press, £10
Irene Wagner is a bored Viennese housewife who, to vary the round of walks and tea-parties with which a woman of her position was expected to occupy herself, takes a lover - a déclassé, somewhat raffish pianist.
Leaving an assignation one day, she is confronted by a snapping harridan (whose unconvincing Billingsgate mars Andrea Bell's otherwise elegant translation), who accuses Irene of stealing her man.
In a fluster, Irene thrusts a fistful of cash into the woman's hand and flees, convinced that her veil would disguise her sufficiently to prevent the irate girlfriend tracking her down. Unfortunately for Irene, the woman later accosts her outside her own home, demanding more money in exchange for her silence.
Irene's life is transformed utterly. The giddy shudder of terror that she used to feel when leaving her lover's house becomes a permanent straitjacket of fear that confines Irene to her house and forces her to examine her soul. Eventually, the blackmailer demands Irene's engagement ring; after acquiescing, Irene entertains suicidal, yet strangely liberating thoughts.
Fear’s flaws are obvious yet intriguing
Fear is the latest in the excellent Pushkin Press's series of Zweig reissues. Although garnering praise from many, the reappearance of Zweig in English has not been universally welcomed. Distinguished translator Michael Hofmann, in the London Review of Books, called Zweig "putrid", his works "hypothetical and bloodless and stiltedly extreme".
Fear's flaws are obvious yet intriguing. For a book dealing with all-encompassing effect of a single, intense emotion, Fear is strangely placid. Zweig constantly describes - "feel" is a word he keeps close by - rather than evokes the passions. He smothers his characters with attention; nothing is left uncontemplated, implicit or shadowy. But this is because Zweig's fiction aspires to be a science of the human heart.
Zweig was a friend and follower of Freud. It might be tempting to find Freud's influence in Fear's dream sequence (which, being of unsublimated blatancy, does not require a psychoanalyst to unpack it). However, it is far more fruitful to view Zweig's artless tracing of Irene's emotional state - "Here the pictures in her mind's eye were suddenly extinguished in the darkness of a confused and cruel fear" - as a kind of psychic anatomy lesson: an attempt, like Freud's, to strip bare the mechanics of the mind.
The resultant sense of unreality might not be to everyone's taste (the characters certainly seem to be in search of a theme) but this should not stop Stefan Zweig being considered as a thoroughly modern writer of considerable interest.
