Psychological bounties

Austrian Stefan Zweig was perhaps the world's first literary superstar. Before Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown swept the world with fantastical plots and shoddy sentences, Zweig rose to worldwide acclaim between the world wars, making his reputation first as a novelist and translator and finally as a biographer of personalities as wide-ranging as Magellan and Marie Antoinette. Zweig's status has diminished significantly since he and his second wife committed suicide in 1942 in Brazil, where they had exiled themselves from the Nazi regime.

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in Zweig's work, however, sparked almost single-handedly by London's Pushkin Press, which has commissioned 10 new translations of Zweig's novels in the past several years. Fear is the latest of Zweig's texts to face re-examination, and though some aspects of Zweig's style have tarnished with time, noted translator Anthea Bell has breathed new life into this short, fast-paced psychological drama.

The narrative is centered on a few weeks in the life of Irene, a well-to-do lawyer's wife in 1920s Vienna. Confronted by the poor girlfriend of her illicit lover after a midday tryst, Irene is forced to hand over increasing sums of money to keep her blackmailer quiet. Tension - and fear - builds as Irene goes to greater lengths to hide her dirty secret from her husband and thus preserve an appearance of bourgeois gentility. 

Zweig masterfully charts the interior life of his protagonist as she transforms from a bored young housewife invigorated by her illicit love affair to a neurotic, doting woman desperate to keep her family life free of scandal. Along the way, Irene is driven to the verge of suicide by the pressure of maintaining an air of calm.

Fear
By Stefan Zweig
Translated by Anthea Bell
Pushkin Press 2010
106 pages

Zweig's prose - in Bell's translation - is solid, crystal clear and flecked with occasional glints of lyrical flare. This is largely restrained writing, and Zweig is willing to rein himself in to charm his readers with a few well-placed similes over the course of his meticulously precise descriptions.

A scene in which the guilt-ridden Irene sits with her husband at lunch is one example: "She dared not raise her eyes, yet now, looking down, she was even more alarmed to see his hands, usually so still and steady, moving up and down on the table like little wild animals."

But there are moments in Fear when the highly strained emotion of Zweig's prose betrays his grounding in the social models of his era. It is revealing to realize that Zweig lived and worked in Vienna at the same time as Sigmund Freud, and Fear was published the same year as Beyond the Pleasure Principal. Passages like the following are so steeped in Freudian furor they are difficult to take seriously. 

"Her desiccated soul, yearning for human company, was absorbing all the life and enjoyment that it could. Music in the next room tempted her, moving far into her beneath her burning skin. ? she was out of control, restless, her mind blissfully melting away ? her whole body was tense, so tense that the clothes on her back were burning, and she would have liked to tear them all off spontaneously, so that she could dance naked and sense this intoxicating frenzy even deeper inside her."

Despite the occasional swath of purple prose, Zweig weaves a thrilling tale. The novella's conclusion seems too easily arrived at, tightening every lynchpin in a few paragraphs, and here the one-off quality of much of Zweig's writing is most evident: As an enormously popular writer with a tremendous output, Zweig produced an uneven body of work, some of which was made to order for an adoring public. But considering the heights (and depths) to which Zweig takes his readers in Fear's 100 pages, a swift conclusion is forgivable.

Fear is not a major novel, nor is it one of Zweig's major novels. But Zweig's subject, fear - or angst, as he titled the book in German - is rich in drama, a matter attested to by the fact that several film versions of the book have been produced. Zweig's richly textured style is the perfect match for his subject, and the book is worth reading at the very least to witness Zweig's mastery of the novella form. Contemporary writers could learn from Zweig's meticulously crafted prose, and one hopes that more of it will soon be made available in English translation.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com