[TBF]∎ Libro Amok and Other Stories Pushkin Collection Stefan Zweig Anthea Bell 9781901285666 Books

Amok and Other Stories Pushkin Collection Stefan Zweig Anthea Bell 9781901285666 Books

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Amok and Other Stories Pushkin Collection Stefan Zweig Anthea Bell 9781901285666 Books

Because it came to hand that way! And because the four stories in this pocket-sized collection were not assembled as a single book in German; they were published in German far apart, in 1904, 1922, 1936, and 1954, long after Zweig's suicide in 1942. Also, the translator, Anthea Bell, has earned some credibility with previous works. Unfortunately, now my curiosity is aroused, especially about the long story "Amok", and I'll have to locate the original to confirm or to contradict the unexpected.

Amok: A misanthropic European, the narrator of the tale, boards a crowded steamer in Malaysia, taking a tiny sultry cabin amidships near the engine room, bound for Naples. Unable to tolerate the chatter of his fellow passengers on deck, he resorts to sleeping all day and prowling the ship under the stars. By uncanny chance, he meets another reclusive European, a doctor who has spent seven years in a tropical hell, who compulsively tells him a horrific story of passion and deception, a story that hinges on the distinction between duty and morality. Meanwhile the ship churns indifferently through phosphorescent seas and the stars gleam coldly in anthracite night. The author? Joseph Conrad, of course? No, think again. This is a 75-page masterpiece by Stefan Zweig. Whether Zweig was influenced by Conrad, or even aware of Conrad, I have no information. Possibly the English translation amplifies the similarity of style, but certainly the narrative structure and the issues of moral responsibility raised are thoroughly Conradesque.

The other long story, Leporella, is solidly in the tradition of German novellas, with traces of Kleist in its themes. It's a tale of murder and suicide. In fact, all four stories in this set involve suicide, a choice patently influenced by the awareness of Zweig's own fate. Leporella is a Tirolian, a servant in the home of a philandering baron whom she worships doggishly; her 'nickname' is an allusion to Leporello, the knavish servant of Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera. "Leporella" is also a well developed mood piece replete with moral ambiguities.

"Incident on Lake Geneva" is little more than an anecdote, but a touching one. A Russian prisoner of war, following World War 1, escapes and strives frantically to reach "home", without any geographical sense of the distance from the far shore of lake Geneva to the border of Russia. "A Star Above the Forest" is a polished 'short story' in the manner of Kleist or Theodore Storm; a sensible hotel waiter is suddenly hopelessly enamored of an elegant Baroness whose shoulder he chances to brush while he is serving her dinner; his feelings become obsessive, though the Baroness notices nothing. Eventually the Baroness departs ...

There's a formality about these stories, an attention to classic proportion and polish, that may seem 'old-fashioned', especially coming from a writer like Stefan Zweig known for his political fervor. But the stories do reflect Zweig's career-long preoccupation with the cruelties of class and wealth disparity. Zweig was born in 1881; he was in fact a generation older than most of the German and Austrian writers who produced their best works after World War 1, and his suicide in 1942 was NOT the act of a youngster but rather of a man who had bridged two generations and beheld both World Wars. I get quite a different impression of him from these stories than from his better-known longer works, more the impression of a craftsman.


Tags : Amok and Other Stories (Pushkin Collection) [Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <div><div>A DOCTOR IN the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty culminates in an almost lyrical death and a prisoner-of-war longing to be home again in Russia. In these four stories,Stefan Zweig, Anthea Bell,Amok and Other Stories (Pushkin Collection),Pushkin Press,1901285669,Anthologies (multiple authors),1881-1942,Fiction,Fiction Anthologies (multiple authors),Fiction Classics,Fiction Literary,Fiction Short Stories (single author),Fiction anthologies & collections,General,Literature - Classics Criticism,Modern fiction,Translations into English,Zweig, Stefan,

Amok and Other Stories Pushkin Collection Stefan Zweig Anthea Bell 9781901285666 Books Reviews

Stefan Zweig's translated books were for a while sold under the name Stephen Branch. That says a lot about the stupidity of public opinion, doesn't it? Sellers were afraid to let the German origin of the author's name shine through. In the case of a man who had to run from home to save himself, that sounds like a desperate kind of irony.

My own relation to SZ has always been cool. He is one of the greater names in German prose of the 20th century, but his language did not reach me. I tried a few times in the past and gave up on him. Compared to many of his colleagues from the same age batch and from the same exile, I found him rather dull. I am thinking here of Thomas Mann, Alfred Doeblin, Joseph Roth, or even Franz Werfel or Jakob Wassermann. The only one that I can think of who left me as cold as Zweig was Heinrich Mann.

Now I give him a new chance with a volume of short stories. And there it is again the language barrier! It is almost as if the man had not learned to write proper German. His sentences are conventional, clumsy, stiff, overly constructed, unmelodious, at times even grammatically incorrect, with archaic words and idioms...

But... There is more to a piece of fiction than strings of words. There is structure, or composition. And not to forget content, meaning, message. With his stories, Zweig reaches back to the previous century. Mainly Kleist comes to my mind, at least for the stories assembled in this volume. Zweig's stories were outsiders in their own time.

The title story here seems to belong more to the world of Conrad or Maugham than to an Austrian's narrator is a traveler on the way from Calcutta to Naples. The trip is uncomfortable, overcrowded, noisy. The man finds rest sitting on deck in dark places at night, where he meets another the box-in-the-box narrator, a German medical doctor on the way back home after 7 years of lonely work in an isolated station in Dutch East India. The doctor is barely sane and drags us into a tirade of hatred, madness, and despair. He tells us a wild and bloody story, powered by his loathing of himself and everybody else. He hates natives, he hates superior women who make him insanely dependant, he hates himself, he hates his audience. Conrad telling a Kleist tale, that is a somewhat accurate label for this powerful and disgusting story. However Conrad's English, though not his first language, was better than Zweig's German, i.m.h.o.

I read the Amokläufer in a German pocket book which contains the same stories as this English edition plus a few more. The most important and longest of the others is Leporella, which seems to have been published only posthumously, and which may have been written late in life. I find no fault with the language in this one. It seems to be technically more mature, without having become `likable' to my sense of language.
That allows me to focus more on the comparison to Kleist. Kleist's tales are mostly violent and compact, rather like Zweig's, but Kleist had something that I miss entirely in these Zweig tales sympathy with his protagonists, or maybe I should call it empathy. Zweig treats his people like lab rats, or like objects at a freak show. The character Leporella is a case in point a simple woman from an Alpine valley has found her way to the household of a Viennese baron, who lives in an unhappy marriage with an older richer ugly woman. One of the playboy's playmates coins the nickname Leporella for Cenzi, alluding to Don Giovanni's servant. The poor woman feels understood by the boss and does him the ultimate favor she murders his wife, only to find her act of devotion rejected.
This is a very terrible story and I don't think, Kleist would have told it if he had found it in the streets. Zweig was essentially a misanthrope without the tiniest little shred of humor or pity.
Admittedly these are strong statements based on a story collection. I will check out some others of his books, notably the Chess Novel.
I had bought this book for the German story "Verwirrung der Gefuehle", which I had read as a young girl. Stefan Zweig is a master of describing feelings.
Zweig is honest, vivid, gut-wrenching, engaging. A superb compilation!
My mother tried to get me to read Stefan Zweig for a long time and my answer always was "Who wants to read the old Germans?". After reading Amok my answer is "Me!"

This collection of short stories is a trip into the human soul with all its perfections and its dark places. The author makes us feel the vibrations of the heart and body of each of his characters and whether we like them or not we know why they are doing whatever they are doing.

What a shame Zweig died so young, his production as an older more "lived" person would have been fantastic.

This is a must read for anyone who likes short stories and for everyone interested in the human condition.
Jeffrey Archer highly recommended this book on his Twitter feed. That's a much more credible thumbs up than I can muster. "Amok" itself ia one of those rare stories that has scratched an indelible character, the doctor, into my consciousness.

On the downside, I could not sleep until the story was finished at 3AM.
Zweig was credited as the inspiration of Grand Budapest Hotel (which I was not crazy about), but these stories only have the time and place in common with that movie. They are stories of obsessed, afflicted and melancholy individuals, sympathetically told with real literary skill.
Because it came to hand that way! And because the four stories in this pocket-sized collection were not assembled as a single book in German; they were published in German far apart, in 1904, 1922, 1936, and 1954, long after Zweig's suicide in 1942. Also, the translator, Anthea Bell, has earned some credibility with previous works. Unfortunately, now my curiosity is aroused, especially about the long story "Amok", and I'll have to locate the original to confirm or to contradict the unexpected.

Amok A misanthropic European, the narrator of the tale, boards a crowded steamer in Malaysia, taking a tiny sultry cabin amidships near the engine room, bound for Naples. Unable to tolerate the chatter of his fellow passengers on deck, he resorts to sleeping all day and prowling the ship under the stars. By uncanny chance, he meets another reclusive European, a doctor who has spent seven years in a tropical hell, who compulsively tells him a horrific story of passion and deception, a story that hinges on the distinction between duty and morality. Meanwhile the ship churns indifferently through phosphorescent seas and the stars gleam coldly in anthracite night. The author? Joseph Conrad, of course? No, think again. This is a 75-page masterpiece by Stefan Zweig. Whether Zweig was influenced by Conrad, or even aware of Conrad, I have no information. Possibly the English translation amplifies the similarity of style, but certainly the narrative structure and the issues of moral responsibility raised are thoroughly Conradesque.

The other long story, Leporella, is solidly in the tradition of German novellas, with traces of Kleist in its themes. It's a tale of murder and suicide. In fact, all four stories in this set involve suicide, a choice patently influenced by the awareness of Zweig's own fate. Leporella is a Tirolian, a servant in the home of a philandering baron whom she worships doggishly; her 'nickname' is an allusion to Leporello, the knavish servant of Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera. "Leporella" is also a well developed mood piece replete with moral ambiguities.

"Incident on Lake Geneva" is little more than an anecdote, but a touching one. A Russian prisoner of war, following World War 1, escapes and strives frantically to reach "home", without any geographical sense of the distance from the far shore of lake Geneva to the border of Russia. "A Star Above the Forest" is a polished 'short story' in the manner of Kleist or Theodore Storm; a sensible hotel waiter is suddenly hopelessly enamored of an elegant Baroness whose shoulder he chances to brush while he is serving her dinner; his feelings become obsessive, though the Baroness notices nothing. Eventually the Baroness departs ...

There's a formality about these stories, an attention to classic proportion and polish, that may seem 'old-fashioned', especially coming from a writer like Stefan Zweig known for his political fervor. But the stories do reflect Zweig's career-long preoccupation with the cruelties of class and wealth disparity. Zweig was born in 1881; he was in fact a generation older than most of the German and Austrian writers who produced their best works after World War 1, and his suicide in 1942 was NOT the act of a youngster but rather of a man who had bridged two generations and beheld both World Wars. I get quite a different impression of him from these stories than from his better-known longer works, more the impression of a craftsman.