'It's good to have him back", Salman Rushdie wrote at the beginning of the Stefan Zweig revival. "Stefan Zweig just tastes fake," wrote the critic and translator, Michael Hofmann. "He's the Pepsi of Austrian writing."
Who is right? The Invisible Collection is a book of 10 stories, written between 1903 and the 1930s. They are, as the subtitle suggests, "Tales of Obsession and Desire" and they support both views of Zweig.
Critics will point to the sometimes bland prose and middlebrow realism. There is hardly a striking sentence in the book. Then there is the old-fashioned feel of the stories. How could Zweig have been a contemporary of Kafka and Scott Fitzgerald? These stories feel like something from an earlier age that had never heard of Modernism.
For a Jewish refugee, driven out of his native Austria by the rise of fascism, there are few references to Jews and those are often worryingly clichéd.
In The Miracles of Life we meet the beautiful and mysterious Esther, reminiscent of Walter Scott's Rebecca in Ivanhoe. She is the granddaughter of "an old Jew with his long beard a-quiver" who is killed in a pogrom.
'We should be grateful to Pushkin Press for bringing Zweig’s voice back to life'
Women are mostly hysterical and highly sexualised, even murderous. The stories come to life when there is a bond between two men, usually the narrator and another character.
A group of four stories, all written in the 1920s, are very different, however: full of life, pathos and, in two cases, menace. The first two are the sad stories of old German men at the end of their lives. The title story is about a now blind art collector and his family, ruined by the economic collapse which followed the First World War. A dealer visits him, hoping to make money out of the old man.
This is Zweig's world: he himself was a passionate collector. But there is something about the way the old man is deceived by his loved ones that is deeply moving. Downfall of the Heart also tells the story of an old man, at the end of his life, distraught over the promiscuity of his young daughter and the collapse of his authority as husband and father.
Only the Jewish faith of his fathers can sustain him.
Leporella is a much darker tale. The woman of the house is highly strung and increasingly hysterical.
She has married badly and the cook (Leporella) loathes her. And Leporella is drawn to the woman's husband. Where will such hatred lead her? Finally, there is one of Zweig's greatest stories, Amok, a Conradian tale of a German doctor, forced to work in the tropics.
He meets a mysterious, beautiful woman and faces a difficult moral choice which could lead him to love and fulfilment or to disaster.
The sadness and darkness of these stories of solitary lives that end in loneliness, even murder or suicide are Zweig at his best. This is what made him so popular in pre-war central Europe. In Amok, the narrator describes "a voice in the dark". That is Zweig. We should be grateful to Pushkin Press for bringing that voice back to life in a series of handsome new translations.
