Product Description

Reprinted with a new cover in B format for the fourth time due to popular demand, "Beware Of Pity" is a powerful novel which explores the complex hidden recesses of emotion. In 1913, a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible dangers of pity and eventually flees from them into the battlefield. His involvement begins with a faux pas: he had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance. Paying her an occasional afternoon call seemed to give him a new sense of purpose and he did not notice how imperceptibly bound up with tenderness his concern might be. The girl's face brightened, her father doted, the young man's self-esteem rose. But he was gradually to learn that pity, like morphia, is only a first solace to the invalid and unless one knows the exact dosage, and when to stop, it can become a virulent poison. "Beware of Pity" is Stefan Zweig's only novel and is a devastatingly sober realisation of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, set against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12033 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-01
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 365 pages

Review
Frighteningly gripping … an intoxicating, morally shaking read about human responsibilities and a real reminder of what fiction can do best. --Ali Smith Best Books of the Year, The Guardian

Pushkin's fine list of classics continues with the only novel by Viennese master Stefan Zweig … both a shrewd political parable and a gorgeous period-piece. --Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

A most powerful novel … What is so impressive about Beware of Pity is Zweig's ability to make us feel the violently shifting emotions of all his characters as if they were our own. Only a writer of great sensitivity could do this. --Anthony Daniels The Sunday Telegraph

About the Author
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy 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 bed in an apparent double suicide.

Customer Reviews

Pushkin Press release another Classic
There are two reasons to buy this book:
1)The edition is exquisite. Pushkin Press (a small publishing house based in London devoted to the publishing of great, but forgotten C20th European novels) produce books of great taste; free of blurbs, unsightly reviews and garish shiny covers. The translations are always top quality, the leetering is great, printed on thick textured paper.
These books WILL become collectors items. Buy them and support this forward looking publishing house.

2)The book is exceptional. Unlike his contemporary Thomas Mann, Zweig never wastes a word; this is an exciting, enthralling page turner. It is also a very sensitive psychological study; of pity and its implications, obsession, vanity and despair; surely the only important issues for art. You will be moved to tears, you will scream at the characters and you will be glad that you have bought this masterpiece.

Zweig is a truly great novelist and I can assure you that after you buy this novel, you will buy all his other work

A wonderful novel in a fine presentation
I came to this book with some trepidation, firstly because it looked rather long and dense (long is fine, but long and dense maybe not) and secondly because the topic of a mistaken love affair is not really up my street. However, it was the January choice of my book group, so I had to read it. Within a few pages I was hooked. The novel, set in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the early part of the 20th century, tells the story of a young second lieutenant who finds himself embroiled in a relationship with a partly paralysed 17 year old girl. Her family encourage the relationship and it is only when it is too late that he discovers the girl's love for him and also the impossibility of breaking her heart at a time she is about to embark on a new course of medical treatment, so she can get better "just for him". The novel is not just about love, it is about obsession, guilt, and the way the expectations of others can so easily dominate our choices so that we act as others expect us rather than as we want to. It is interesting to view this story in the light of modern assertiveness training, because all the way through the reader can see that Toni, the young officer, is subjugating his own needs for the needs of someone to whom he has no obligations whatsoever - he is in fact ruled only by her fantasies and the expectations of her father and sister.

The novel is remarkably suspenseful because the plot unfolds gradually and at each stage the reader cringes as the net of this sick love slowly ensnares him. It is full of strong characters: the doctor who treats the young woman and slowly enveigles Toni in her treatment regime; the old brutal colonel who turns out to be more wise than the other characters; the girls father who's whole life is a quest for his daughter's well-being. Different aspects of these characters are revealed as the novel slowly travels towards its inevitable conclusion and each one has a unique role in the ensnarement and ultimate release of the young officer.

The novel is beautifully produced by Pushkin press - the clear typeface, fine paper and strong cover makes this a pleasure to read. Alas, this is Zweig's only novel and I was left thirsting for more from this fine writer.

Between Freud and Christ
It is impossible to commend this wonderful book too highly. All praise to the Pushkin Press for letting us have this and so many other great, neglected works available in translation. The plot is utterly gripping - there are no chapter divisions and none are needed for one turns the pages feverishly and breathlessly, yet space for the profoundest reflections on love, pity and sympathy opens in the flow so that there is never a claustrophobic sense. In its pyschological penetration, in its understanding of the relations of the moral, the religious and the sensuous and the corruption that can arise in each sphere it is up there with Kierkegaard or Dostoyevsky. Deeply embedded in the structure of the Austrian Empire the book is absolutely universal with an intensity and breadth of sympathy for its characters that seems to belong at once to the hothouses world of Freud and and to the inspirations of the mystics. Don't read anything else before you read this.