Product Description

“CINDERELLA MEETS BONNIE AND CLYDE IN THIS HAUNTING TALE OF THE BOOM AND BUST OF CAPITALISM” Christine toils away in a provincial Austrian post office when, out of the blue, a telegram arrives inviting her to join an American aunt she’s never known in a fashionable Swiss resort. Bowed by the grinding poverty and hardships of the post-war years and anxious about her ailing and dependent mother she accepts, only to be swept up into a world of almost inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed. Then, just as abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose and she has to return to the post office, where, yes, nothing will ever be the same. Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, forced to work on construction sites. They are drawn to each other, just as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Yet their attempts at seduction and love can only flounder among the degradations of poverty until, in one desperate and decisive act, they find a way to remake their world from within.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3340 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'A masterful observation of hope and despair' --The Observer, March 2, 2009

Review
'An extraordinary work ... there's a volcanic energy to Zweig's writing ... wholly mesmerising.'

Review
'In The Post Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart.'

Customer Reviews

Thought provoking
The story is about a young Austrian girl,Christine who lives in poverty with her sick mother, and works in a post office, just after World War 1. She unexpectedly receives an invitation from a rich aunt (who'd never previously had contact with her) to join her on a holiday in Switzerland. She arrives feeling ashamed of her poor clothes and obvious poverty, but like the Fairy Godmother, the aunt soon transforms her with the aid of a few shopping sprees and a make-over, and soon Christine is transformed and accepted by the posh young set at the hotel. I won't spoil the ending for you, but suddenly the aunt decides to send Christine packing, and Christine is unable to settle or accept her old life, and becomes bad-tempered and solitary. It is then that she meets Ferdinand, a kindred spirit who is also unable to accept his undeserved lot in life. This is when they hatch their plan ...

The story is quite intense, deep and thought-provoking. It certainly brings home how we can take what we have for granted, and how easily it can be taken away.

Crisis? What crisis?
There are some books which still feel relevant whenever they are read, no matter when they were written. This is one such book. Discovered after the author had committed suicide in 1942 after having fled Nazi Germany it is the tale of a girl, the 'Post Office Girl' of the title, who, for a few days, gets to experience the rich life in Switzerland before being dumped back into obscurity. It details the clash between feeling important and being someone because you have money, and the frustration and obscurity of those without money who feel cheated by the Austrian state. It is a tale of hope and despair, of dreams realised and broken. Set in 1926 with Austria in economic crisis due to the First World War it is truly a clash of cultures - between those who probably don't realise anything is wrong and those who feel it too keenly - the writing throws you straight into this situation and there is not a word out of place here. The plot is taut and carries you with it right inside the head of the Post Office Girl. I can't reccommend this book highly enough.

"Which way shall I fly? Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
. . . and in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threatening to devour me, opens wide,
To which the he ll I suffer seems a heaven."
John Milton, Paradise Lost

There are some books that you can finish, put back down on the table and five-minutes later have it virtually erased from your consciousness. Stefan Zweig's "The Post-Office Girl" stayed with me long after I put the book down. It is a brilliantly crafted book that looks at the mind-boggling despair that can crush the soul out of just about anyone. What makes the book memorable is the fact that Zweig does not write with an overwhelming appeal to pathos. No, instead, Zweig is direct and his narrative manages to convey this sense of despair without drowning the reader in rhetorical devices aimed at soliciting.

The setting is post World War I Austria in the 1920s. The Austro-Hungarian empire has been dismantled after the Treaty of Versailles and Austria, like her ally Germany, is suffering the `economic consequences of the peace'. The Post-Office Girl is Christine Hoflehner. At the war's outset, Christine and her family enjoyed a comfortable middle-class existence in Vienna. But the war and the economic suffering brought on by the hyper-inflation of the 1920s has booted Christine out of Vienna and her middle class life. She and her mother live at the poverty level in a one-room bed-sitter in a village two hours from Vienna. Christine works as a low-ranking postal official in the town's post office. As the story opens she's in her 20s and merely going through the motions. But her robot-like existence is shattered when she receives a telegram (a big event) from an aunt, her mother's sister, who left Austria before the war and married a rich American businessman. They invite Christine to spend a holiday with them in a Swiss mountain resort. Christine goes grudgingly but is astonished at the life she is exposed too. Her aunt buys her beautiful clothes, feeds her well and all of a sudden Christine is exposed to a life she never knew existed. She takes to it immediately. She relishes her new life and cherishes every minute of it. But no sooner has she found a new life than she is tossed back into the old one. Any despair Christine may have felt before her Swiss trip is now magnified by the fact that she has actually seen how different life can be. She arrives at what she thought was the lowest deep only to discover that there are depths of despair yet to go.

It is at this point that she finds Ferdinand on a day trip to Vienna. For Ferdinand life has been, if anything, unkind to him than to Christine. Their meeting and their developing relationship takes us through the second half of the book. They know they are soul mates but their existence is such that they each know that love (if you can call their fumbling attempts at personal physical and social intimacy love) is not nearly enough to be of any help to them at all. They face the question posed by Milton in the heading of this review - which way shall they fly? Zweig's resolution is, in this context, perfect.

What Zweig has done so well in my opinion is to use Christine and Ferdinand as a masterful vehicle for looking at Austrian (and Europe generally) society in the aftermath of the Great War. Zweig's characters are well crafted and felt very realistically drawn to me. They were absorbing, warts and all. "The Post-Office Girl" was well worth reading and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in reading a book that lingers with you after you are done. L. Fleisig