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January 05, 2004

FOCUS ON STEFAN ZWEIG

Anthony Daniels takes a look at Stefan Zweig, the overlooked author best known for The Royal Game and Beware of Pity.

Literary fashion is as fickle and inexplicable as any other kind of fashion. In France, Stefan Zweig is regarded as one of the great writers of the 20th century. He has never gone out of print there (except during the Occupation), his complete works are available in cheap omnibus editions, his fiction is on sale at airport bookstalls, as are his brilliant biographies of figures such as Magellan, Erasmus, Calvin, Mary Queen of Scots, Amerigo Vespucci and Fouche, and studies of his life and work are published at regular intervals.

By contrast, he is neglected in all English-speaking countries. Although he died a British citizen, having fled his native Austria, he is almost unknown on our side of the Channel. In my opinion, it is the French who are right in their estimation of him.

If you can resist the obvious impulse to make jokes about the French being right, it's worth looking more closely at Zweig. I first read him when my mother gave me a copy of The Royal Game, and I continued on reading much of his remaining work. Zweig, like a number of other great European talents including Ernst Kirchner and Walter Benjamin, committed suicide rather than a face a future controlled by the Nazis.

There are some very good resources online, including www.stefanzweig.org and Reed Library's Stefan Zweig Collection. If you don't know Zweig's work, take a few moments to acquaint yourself with him.

UPDATE: Looks like Sarah and Sam had this first but my vacation was from blog reading as well as writing ...

Posted at 12:21 AM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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