In the autumn of his days, a distinguished privy councillor contemplates his past, looking back at the key moments of his life. A reluctant and indolent student, he recalls the chance meeting with a professor and his wife, which leads to his sharing their lodgings. In a flash of revelation, the professor unlocks his thirst for knowledge and an ambiguous and close friendship is formed. But the professor harbors a dark secret which changes and scars both men forever.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Confusion is one of his finest and most exemplary works... a marvellously poised account of misunderstood motives, thwarted love, and sublimated desires... a perfect reminder of, or introduction to, Zweig's economy and subtlety as a writer" ROBERT MACFARLANE Times Literary Supplement "Passion and dedication... Outside the works of Plato, I don't think I have ever read a better or more honest account of what ill always remain at the heart of teaching" GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI The Jewish Chronicle "Heaven knows what the righteous brigade would make of Stefan Zweig's novella Confusion, recently published in a new translation by Anthea Bell by the admirable and tireless Pushkin Press. Confusion, which I recently devoured at a sitting, is in essence a simple story. An elderly academic looks back on the most intense and formative relationship of his life. The setting is a small and secluded German university, where as an undergraduate he came under the spell of a strange and ambiguous figure, part inspirational teacher, part broken old man. Roland (the only person named in this pared-down tale) becomes the lodger and then amanuensis of this Shakespearean scholar, who dictates to him the first part of the history of the Globe Theatre he has been working on for decades but has never finished. At the same time Roland is driven to distraction by the professor's apparently cruel and disdainful treatment of him; eventually he shares his frustration with the professor's much younger, boyishly attractive and sexually unsatisfied wife. You can imagine the consequences. Roland feels he has betrayed his teacher, and everything that matters to him, but the terrible and tender kiss that ends the story betrays a deeper secret. The professor's unfeeling facade has been a mask to protect both teacher and student from an impossible love. Yet far from being at the end repelled by an old man's lust, Roland closes his account with these words: "I feel I have more to thank him for than my mother and father before him or my wife and children after him. I have never loved anyone more." If Prof Purvis and others like her were shocked at Prof Beard's admission of an "ambivalent reaction" to groping dons, what on earth would they make of Roland's thoroughly unambivalent declaration of love for a lecherous lecturer? To make more sense of this, it is worth going back to the earliest, most beautiful and shocking discussion of the erotic dimension of pedagogy in western literature, the speech by Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. What is shocking there is Alcibiades's utterly frank description of his attempt, as a young and beautiful boy, to seduce his (relatively old and famously ugly) teacher, Socrates. Thinking he will be able to exchange his youthful beauty for Socrates's mature wisdom, and counting on the philosopher's known penchant for beautiful young men, Alcibiades goes to great lengths to lure the great thinker into bed. He invites Socrates to train and wrestle with him in the gymnasium (remember that Greeks exercised naked); he invites Socrates to a tete-a-tete dinner, twice; eventually he creeps into bed with his teacher and snuggles up to him under the blanket, but still Socrates resists. When asked by the slighted Alcibiades to explain his actions, or lack of them, Socrates gives a typically teasing and challenging answer. He points out that if Alcibiades really thought he could exchange his physical good looks for the intellectual beauty he sees in Socrates, he would be getting by far the better end of the deal. He would be exchanging dross for gold. But he is not yet old enough to see clearly, and may well be mistaken. Not all teachers have been able to exercise Socrates's self-control. Roland, after that kiss, never saw the professor again. But Socrates and Alcibiades seem to have remained friends." Harry Eyres, Financial Times"
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. ANTHEA BELL is the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation. She lives in Cambridge, England.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The complex relationship between student and teacher,
By Jeff Abell (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R von D (Perfect Paperback)
A friend who teaches European lit asked me if I didn't think Stefan Zweig was "sentimental." But in the case of "Confusion," all the high emotion fits the story of a rather obsessive-compulsive young man, who is rather disinterested in learning until he meets the right teacher. Framed by the perspective of this same young man as a 60-year-old professor, the tale is even more poignant. This tale of an over-eager student, who can't see that he's behaving like a spurned lover when his teacher criticizes him, is a searing psychological study. Considering that Zweig gave the eulogy at Freud's funeral, who better to explore such things? I've never read a work by Zweig I didn't find richly textured, beautifully written, and deeply felt. If that's "sentimental," then I plead guilty!
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rediscover the long-neglected Zweig,
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This review is from: Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R von D (Perfect Paperback)
It's nearly impossible to review "Confusion" without giving away the "hideous secret" on which the plot turns, so I'll limit myself to saying that, by today's standards (outside conservative America, at least), the scenario Zweig offers here verges on implausible. Today, the Professor's "vice" would be well known, of little consequence, and hardly likely to generate much confusion - least of all in Roland, an intelligent and highly-sexed nineteen year-old. Zweig's popularity declined soon after his death in 1942 and his sentimental humanism, based on the values of late nineteenth-century Viennese liberalism, has made him an easy target for some. Yet his vivid, psychoanalytically-oriented biographies, novellas and stories are still incredibly engaging. Something like the fictional equivalent of Freud's collected works, they usually deal with the psychological representation of repressed personalities suffering major crises under the weight of nineteenth-century values, and in that sense they are wonderfully evocative of the time. For twenty-first century readers, I suppose, it's that shift in values that is now part of the point of reading Zweig, and a large part of the pleasure. But not only that: his focus is always the emotions - agonizing frustrations, secret fears, explosive joys - with insightful analysis of all of them; and his characters are closely observed - entire plots can turn on one look, one word, one obsessively worried-over instant. It's a rich and rewarding oeuvre, not least because of Zweig's finely cadenced voice (translated here with considerable skill by Anthea Bell). "Confusion" is also worth reading for the Professor's unusual theory of Elizabethan drama, its historical motivations, and its arguable place at the pinnacle of English theatre. It's also interesting because it confirms something we all know from experience: that the events which determine the course of our lives are not always the ones others might think.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Zweig should be rediscovered,
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This review is from: Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R von D (Perfect Paperback)
I knew of Zweig as Richard Strauss' librettist. Wanting to see what his work was like when he stood on his own I discovered his novella, "Confusion". Elegantly and tautly written it is the story of a respected professor reflecting back upon his life and about the man who had the greatest impact on his life. This man is his English professor. As a young student, our narrator is drawn to this brooding man and his mysterious wife. He is drawn into the web of their lives and the terrible secret that is hidden there.
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