Customer Reviews

Amok and Other Stories

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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.

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.

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.

Stefan Zweig's translated books were for a while sold under the name Stephen Branch. That says a lot about the stupidity of public opinion, doesn't it? Sellers were afraid to let the German origin of the author's name shine through. In the case of a man who had to run from home to save himself, that sounds like a desperate kind of irony.

My own relation to SZ has always been cool. He is one of the greater names in German prose of the 20th century, but his language did not reach me. I tried a few times in the past and gave up on him. Compared to many of his colleagues from the same age batch and from the same exile, I found him rather dull. I am thinking here of Thomas Mann, Alfred Doeblin, Joseph Roth, or even Franz Werfel or Jakob Wassermann. The only one that I can think of who left me as cold as Zweig was Heinrich Mann.

Now I give him a new chance with a volume of short stories. And there it is again: the language barrier! It is almost as if the man had not learned to write proper German. His sentences are conventional, clumsy, stiff, overly constructed, unmelodious, at times even grammatically incorrect, with archaic words and idioms...

But... There is more to a piece of fiction than strings of words. There is structure, or composition. And not to forget: content, meaning, message. With his stories, Zweig reaches back to the previous century. Mainly Kleist comes to my mind, at least for the stories assembled in this volume. Zweig's stories were outsiders in their own time.

The title story here seems to belong more to the world of Conrad or Maugham than to an Austrian's: narrator is a traveler on the way from Calcutta to Naples. The trip is uncomfortable, overcrowded, noisy. The man finds rest sitting on deck in dark places at night, where he meets another: the box-in-the-box narrator, a German medical doctor on the way back home after 7 years of lonely work in an isolated station in Dutch East India. The doctor is barely sane and drags us into a tirade of hatred, madness, and despair. He tells us a wild and bloody story, powered by his loathing of himself and everybody else. He hates natives, he hates superior women who make him insanely dependant, he hates himself, he hates his audience. Conrad telling a Kleist tale, that is a somewhat accurate label for this powerful and disgusting story. However Conrad's English, though not his first language, was better than Zweig's German, i.m.h.o.

I read the Amokläufer in a German pocket book which contains the same stories as this English edition plus a few more. The most important and longest of the others is Leporella, which seems to have been published only posthumously, and which may have been written late in life. I find no fault with the language in this one. It seems to be technically more mature, without having become `likable' to my sense of language.

That allows me to focus more on the comparison to Kleist. Kleist's tales are mostly violent and compact, rather like Zweig's, but Kleist had something that I miss entirely in these Zweig tales: sympathy with his protagonists, or maybe I should call it empathy. Zweig treats his people like lab rats, or like objects at a freak show. The character Leporella is a case in point: a simple woman from an Alpine valley has found her way to the household of a Viennese baron, who lives in an unhappy marriage with an older richer ugly woman. One of the playboy's playmates coins the nickname Leporella for Cenzi, alluding to Don Giovanni's servant. The poor woman feels understood by the boss and does him the ultimate favor: she murders his wife, only to find her act of devotion rejected.

This is a very terrible story and I don't think, Kleist would have told it if he had found it in the streets. Zweig was essentially a misanthrope without the tiniest little shred of humor or pity.

Admittedly these are strong statements based on a story collection. I will check out some others of his books, notably the Chess Novel.

Stefan Zweig is one of the most brilliant storytellers of all time. A personal friend of Sigmund Freud, he understood how to probe the inner workings of the human psyche, revealing not only deeds, but the inner motivations that prompt them. The novelette "Amok" is one of his best works, though the other 3 stories included here ("The Star Above the Forest," "Leporella," and "Incident at Lake Geneva") are equally profound. All these stories concern people who find themselves in impossible situations, usually of their own making, though often they seem trapped by fate as well. As the Doctor says in "Amok," "...the one human right one has left is to die as one wishes." That line might have been Zweig's epithet, for the writer and his wife committed suicide in 1942. That fact gives an added poignancy to the events described in these stories.

A superbly written colection of four stories, two long, two short,that are really about what love does to people. Not necessarily happy stories but great story-telling by one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

Stefan Zweig is an author whose writings make one beg for more all the while knowing that what is available is all that will ever be. I reviewed Chess Story, the first of his books that I found. Then I began a search to find other work. Amok and Other Stories is a small volume containing four short stories, each about the power of obsessive love, desire, need, contrived entitlement, duty and sacrifice. The character in each study is lonely, isolated, of low rank, modest...an invisible creature existing almost on air alone. The character becomes infatuated and mesmerized by another only by chance and the obsession attaches itself magically and mysteriously leading to an ultimate destruction. As one reads these small stories, one becomes fanatical to follow the trail knowing it will take one to the pit of despair. Zweig excels in the portrayal of fringe individuals yet in some obscure way, one wonders if at some time or place, given the circumstance, one could become or one has become as intricately involved with another as to suffer humiliation and defeat or even the possibility of death. We are all vulnerable. Zweig roots out our weaknesses and we watch, as if in a play within a play, helpless, trapped and forlorn, the words on the page live and breathe such depths of torment and frenzy that we are unlikely to escape the impact ever.Chess Story (New York Review Books Classics)The Book ThiefStoner (New York Review Books Classics)

My mother tried to get me to read Stefan Zweig for a long time and my answer always was "Who wants to read the old Germans?". After reading Amok my answer is "Me!"

This collection of short stories is a trip into the human soul with all its perfections and its dark places. The author makes us feel the vibrations of the heart and body of each of his characters and whether we like them or not we know why they are doing whatever they are doing.

What a shame Zweig died so young, his production as an older more "lived" person would have been fantastic.

This is a must read for anyone who likes short stories and for everyone interested in the human condition.