Customer Reviews

Invisible Collection (Old ISBN)

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During his lifetime (1881-1942) Stefan Zweig was one of the most celebrated authors in Europe, and anyone who ventures into his writings will understand why. Zweig's insights into and compassion for his fellow human beings is both astonishing and deeply moving. These two tales are among his most beautiful. "The Invisible Collection" is told by an art dealer, who sets out to purchase a print collection from an old man, only to find himself coerced by the man's family into complicity in a heart-breaking game of deception. (The story is more poignant if you know that Zweig himself was an avid collector of autographs and manuscripts.) "Buchmandel" is an equally wrenching tale of a old Jewish man who has a faultless memory for books, who's life falls apart with the advent of World War I. (Imagine a kind of East-European version of Borges' "Funes the Memorious.") These two tales take the art of story-telling to its most refined state, and you'll understand why Zweig's work was considered some of the greatest writing of its time.

This small book contains two of the most successful stories of Stefan Zweig.
They are both inherently anchored in German history.

In 'The invisible collection', an old and blind man shows his collection of magnificent drawings to a friend. He didn't know that his wife and daughter had to sell them in order to survive during the hyperinflation period in Germany. They replaced them with white papers.

In 'Buchmendel', a jewish literature lover takes always the same seat in a pub. He is sent to a concentration camp. When he comes back, the owner of the pub refuses to give him his old place for racial reasons.
After his death a friend searches for old clients of the pub who knew him. He discovers a whole bunch of very rare books.

Both stories are written in dashing prose. They hypnotyze the reader by unexspected events and excel through the painting of intimate emotions and excellent characterisations.
But most of all, they reveal the tragic influence of 'History' on the fate of normal people who were great on their own.

Two pearls.

The existence of this slim volume baffles me. Alright, it is certainly true that Zweig's stories, many of which are absolutely marvelous, are in dire need of a re-release that would hopefully do something to alleviate their obscurity. Very well; perhaps the editors were operating out of this noble idea. Why, then, did they release only two Zweig stories, out of about twenty? And why did they make those two "Invisible Collection" and "Buchmendel"? Granted, both of them are good; the first is even great, certainly one of the man's best. But why only them? And furthermore, why charge the price of a full-length book for such an obviously sparse selection? I don't get it at all.

Bad judgment, certainly. However, it must be noted that neither of these two stories is included in the _other_ incomplete compilation, The Royal Game And Other Stories. Thus, if you liked those (and I don't see how you couldn't have), this book will make a good complement. However, even so, there are _still_ others that are in need of reprint but are included neither here nor there. Argh!

This nice little book from Pushkin Press, about A5 in size with quality paper, contains two shorts from Austrian author Stefan Zweig, whom I'd no knowledge of prior to spotting this on the shelf. Both stories, named The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel, are linked by the theme of obsession and describe the lives of two different men for whom life was solely about art and literature respectively.

The Invisible Collection begins on a train where the narrator meets an elderly art collector who proceeds to tell him about a recent experience that he believes is the strangest of his career. The story follows the man's trip to a far outpost of Saxony where an old customer lived - this is in the time of the German depression following World War I - in the hope that he may sell up past purchases cheaply in the desperate financial climate. When he arrives, he meets with Franz Kronfeld, an octogenarian and veteran of the 1870s war. He notices that something is amiss with Kronfeld: he is blind. After lunch, Kronfeld's daughter asks that their visitor understands the situation regarding Kronfeld's collection, which he spends time with daily, and, in respect, deceives him so that he never knows the truth about its value, a worth he sees as the saviour of his family through these hard times.

Buchmendel is the longer of the two stories and a more popular tale from the Zweig canon. Another narrator recounts the story of a man called Jacob Mendel, a Russian Jew living in Vienna, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of books. For over thirty years he has sat from dawn to dusk in a coffee shop studying books and taking payment for advice on myriad esoteric subjects. His bibliomania is such that he notices little around him: the advent of electricity, the onset of war. Then, years later, the narrator remembering the character of Mendel returns to the café to find the old man no longer there and only one person, Frau Sporschil, who remembers him. With much sadness she recounts the story of his last few years, and how, emotionally wrecked from his mania and financially ruined from the depression, he was left with nothing and died on the steps of the café in which he had spent the greatest part of his life.

Zweig's couplet of existential tales is emotionally wrought, and study a wider canvas than implied by their setting. Both display what I've found is a familiar trope of the author's work; namely the decline of Europe and its increasing level of corruption - a belief that led to his suicide in 1942. There is a strange authorial decision in The Invisible Collection that, in my opinion, eliminates the need for the opening paragraph, as, to paraphrase, it states that the narrator met a man on the train and the following is what he said. Overall, though, the stories work well together, but a larger collection of Zweig's work would have made a better introduction to his catalogue as it's hard to understand the scope of his writing and ideas when both pieces are thematically linked.