Amok and Other Stories [Paperback]

Stefan Zweig (Author), Anthea Bell (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stefan Zweig was the author of Casanova, Confusion, Fantastic Night & Other Stories, and Twilight.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Pushkin Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1901285669
• ISBN-13: 978-1901285666
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 4.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #328,616 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A master of storytelling, December 31, 2008

By 

H. Carlton "autobiogfreak" (London, Eng.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Amok and Other Stories (Paperback)

Stefan Zweig can be described as a more intellectual, more emotional and more psychological Somerset Maugham. Like Maugham, he was vitally interested in people:this comes across so strongly. He understands people. He knows how they think and how they behave. He gets inside their minds. He can do this with adults, children, sane people and temporarily insane people, (usually insane due to love.)
Try AMOK, or try Letter from an Unknown Woman. You will be hooked. Stefan Zweig grabs you from the first paragraph and doesn't let you go. How long it has been since I have tried to make a book last as long as possible, and how sad I am when the story ends. Yet even those these are rarely over a hundred pages, one feels one has read an entire rich novel.
I do not know exactly the secret of Zweig's magic. Just that he has it, and I would love to have met or known him.
Failing that, I can read him. Over and over.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Read It in English?, August 25, 2010

By 

Giordano Bruno - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Amok and Other Stories (Paperback)

Because it came to hand that way! And because the four stories in this pocket-sized collection were not assembled as a single book in German; they were published in German far apart, in 1904, 1922, 1936, and 1954, long after Zweig's suicide in 1942. Also, the translator, Anthea Bell, has earned some credibility with previous works. Unfortunately, now my curiosity is aroused, especially about the long story "Amok", and I'll have to locate the original to confirm or to contradict the unexpected.

Amok: A misanthropic European, the narrator of the tale, boards a crowded steamer in Malaysia, taking a tiny sultry cabin amidships near the engine room, bound for Naples. Unable to tolerate the chatter of his fellow passengers on deck, he resorts to sleeping all day and prowling the ship under the stars. By uncanny chance, he meets another reclusive European, a doctor who has spent seven years in a tropical hell, who compulsively tells him a horrific story of passion and deception, a story that hinges on the distinction between duty and morality. Meanwhile the ship churns indifferently through phosphorescent seas and the stars gleam coldly in anthracite night. The author? Joseph Conrad, of course? No, think again. This is a 75-page masterpiece by Stefan Zweig. Whether Zweig was influenced by Conrad, or even aware of Conrad, I have no information. Possibly the English translation amplifies the similarity of style, but certainly the narrative structure and the issues of moral responsibility raised are thoroughly Conradesque.

The other long story, Leporella, is solidly in the tradition of German novellas, with traces of Kleist in its themes. It's a tale of murder and suicide. In fact, all four stories in this set involve suicide, a choice patently influenced by the awareness of Zweig's own fate. Leporella is a Tirolian, a servant in the home of a philandering baron whom she worships doggishly; her 'nickname' is an allusion to Leporello, the knavish servant of Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera. "Leporella" is also a well developed mood piece replete with moral ambiguities.

"Incident on Lake Geneva" is little more than an anecdote, but a touching one. A Russian prisoner of war, following World War 1, escapes and strives frantically to reach "home", without any geographical sense of the distance from the far shore of lake Geneva to the border of Russia. "A Star Above the Forest" is a polished 'short story' in the manner of Kleist or Theodore Storm; a sensible hotel waiter is suddenly hopelessly enamored of an elegant Baroness whose shoulder he chances to brush while he is serving her dinner; his feelings become obsessive, though the Baroness notices nothing. Eventually the Baroness departs ...

There's a formality about these stories, an attention to classic proportion and polish, that may seem 'old-fashioned', especially coming from a writer like Stefan Zweig known for his political fervor. But the stories do reflect Zweig's career-long preoccupation with the cruelties of class and wealth disparity. Zweig was born in 1881; he was in fact a generation older than most of the German and Austrian writers who produced their best works after World War 1, and his suicide in 1942 was NOT the act of a youngster but rather of a man who had bridged two generations and beheld both World Wars. I get quite a different impression of him from these stories than from his better-known longer works, more the impression of a craftsman.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Variations on a theme, June 12, 2008

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Amok and Other Stories (Paperback)

SEVERAL VIEWERS HAVE COMPLAINED THAT THIS REVIEW CONTAINS A SPOILER

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.