Product Description

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 shows his gift for the acute analysis of emotional dilemmas. His four tragic and moving cameos of the human condition are played out against cosmopolitan and colonial backgrounds in the first half of the twentieth century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #129937 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-23
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 118 pages

Review
I can t think of a writer who is more successful at depicting amour fou - what one critic describes as sex and madness breaking through the lacquered screen of upper-bourgeois society - nowhere more grippingly than in Amok in which a doctor, a Conradesque loner, is tipped into a sort of human rabies by an unattainable colonial wife --Julie Kavanagh Intelligent Life (The Economist)

About the Author
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a well-to-do Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York; he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide.

Customer Reviews

Amok Time
The four short, intense stories in this anthology may reveal much about the author, given the pertinent details of the end of Zweig's life. That conclusion may also be far too pat.

Comparisons with Conrad rather flatter Zweig, since Conrad is oddly a much more 'modern' author, despite the fact that Conrad's work is older.

The breathless, almost melodramatic, pace of Amok reminded this reviewer of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories. It is, however, a fine story, full of atmosphere; an expertly rendered depiction of a man who, having failed to fulfil his expectations, let alone his dreams, plummets almost willingly into obsession and despair.

The odd clunky phrase 'white as a sheet', 'dark, black night' may be more the work of the translator. Having said that, Anthea Bell surely does well with the character of Crescenz in Leporella and her rural German accent.

One final note, this little book is nicely produced but turns out to be a little too delicate for those of us forced to do much of our reading out of overnight bags. The edges of the covers wear too easily.

Michael Cope 20/05/07

Short stories in the classical tradition
This collection of four stories, reflects the imminent tragedy of Zweig's life (he committed suicide in 1942, believing that the Nazi regime were about to win the war), for they all end in a suicide, causing the reader to wonder how far Zweig had conditioned himself to the thought of death by his own hand in the years leading up to his own demise. In reading this I was reminded of W G Sebald's book The Emigrants, in which his characters also take their own lives.

The stories are rich with understanding of people under pressure. Zweig was a master of describing the agonies of people beset by a burning conscience, the pain of a thwarted desire to return to loved ones, the pain of unrequited love. His characters are people who feel things more deeply than most, who are unable to shrug off emotional pressure or to find escape in diversionary activities. They live on the existential edge of their mental suffering and find no balm in the consolation of friendship or the beauties of nature. The stories serve as a reminder that tragedy can strike anyone, however settled, particularly those who step outside their settled lives, whether voluntarily, in seeking a better life for themselves, or involuntarily through the effects of war or social disruption.

The subjects of these stories feel things greatly. Where others may be upset, these people are desperate. Where others feel affection for a friend, these feel a passionate force that dominates their lives. Where a mistake has been made, Zweig's characters feel a conscience so great that it drives them to distraction. And yet as the newspapers show every day, these things happen in real life, and perhaps Zweig was more plugged into the realities of emotional extremity than those with more settled minds.

Zweig fans will want to own this book, as indeed would anyone who enjoys the short-story tradition of classical European literature.

Variations on a theme
Stefan Zweig is a superb story teller, and the four stories in this volume, all ending in the suicide of the principal character, are full of atmospheric descriptions - of character, of landscape, of atmosphere - and of narrative tension. It does not really matter that the first two stories are inherently incredible. In each of these there is a man instantly possessed to the point of madness by an elegant woman, in each case a social superior. Class and race differences play a strong role: in the first case, set in the Dutch East Indies, the wealthy wife of a merchant is superior to a doctor and the white doctor is superior to the natives; in the second the worshipper of the baroness is a waiter. The third story is more credible, and here it is a peasant servant who is devoted to her baronial master.

Zweig's obsession with suicide in these stories of course have a particular poignancy in view of his own suicide, nowhere more so than in the last story, in which a Russian commits suicide far from home. This was written in 1936, two years after he had himself left his native Austria and six years before he ended his own life in a foreign land.