By Stefan Zweig
Pushkin Press, £9.99
Great storytellers reflect their times, and Stefan Zweig lived through terrible times. Yet a writer whose task it is to shed light upon darkness can also offer redemption, and it is this, in the shape of the redeeming power of love, that lies at the heart of these narratives.
Each of the six stories deals with the events that precede and follow a moment of change. These include the unravelling of the consequences of a young girl’s passion for a lover who remains indifferent to her fate; the tragedy of an elderly book-lover deprived of his reason for living; the death in battle of an aristocratic youth who, having tired of luxury, and incapable of love, finds salvation in a night’s encounters in the gutter. There is, too, a tale of a strait-laced widow who risks all for the love of a handsome young gambler; another of a young girl tricked into believing herself loved by a unknown admirer who does not exist.
But the deeply engrossing stories are not the reader’s only reward. Within every tale is hidden another — that of the storyteller himself. Novelist, essayist, biographer and chronicler of the shifting intellectual sands of Europe through the 1920s and ’30s, Zweig was born in 1881, the son of a wealthy Jewish textile-manufacturer in Vienna. Pacifist in the First World War, lifelong advocate of the unification of Europe, Zweig died in exile in a suicide pact with his wife in Brazil in 1942.
Now, his rehabilitation in the English language is surely complete with the publication by Pushkin Press of this collection of novellas, all but one of which were published during the inter-war years.
While the unifying theme — what happens when lightning strikes and nothing is ever the same — is familiar enough, what sets the work apart is Zweig’s exploration of the deepest recesses of the mind. Every deed and thought is subject to minute scrutiny.
The pace is leisurely but perfectly judged — Dickens and Dostoevsky spring to mind — but what is most remarkable is the sex. Neither prurient nor designed to shock (perhaps it helps that Zweig knew and admired Dr Freud) the sex slips in and out as easily as, well, no doubt you get the picture.
There are other passions, too -— the love of books, the urge to possess — but uppermost is the desire to discover exactly what it is that drives a man and a woman to risk all to satisfy that most unintellectual of urges, the need to mate, and having mated, part.
The narrative, as tightly-woven and richly-coloured as a Renaissance tapestry, unravels as seductively as a woman undressing for her lover.
Elisabeth Luard writes a monthly column in ‘The Oldie’. Her latest memoir, ‘My Life As A Wife’, is published by Timewell. A reading group on Stefan Zweig’s ‘Journey Into the Past’ will take place at Jewish Book Week on Wednesday March 3