This is my first post for this year’s German Literature Month. I am late, but I will console myself by saying that I am the latest 🙂
I read my first Stefan Zweig book last year. It was called ‘A Game of Chess and other stories’. I fell in love with it – with the stories and with Zweig’s prose. So I decided to read my second Zweig book, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman‘. This book has four stories, the title story and three others – ‘A Story Told in Twilight‘, ‘A Debt Paid Late‘ and ‘Forgotten Dreams‘. The first three are the length of a long short story or a short novella – somewhere between forty and fifty pages. The last one is a short story.
In the title story ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman‘, a writer comes home after a walk and when he checks his mail, he finds a letter written in a woman’s handwriting. There is no name on it and no sender’s address. He takes it out and reads it. In that letter a woman tells the writer that she loves him, has always loved him from the time she was a girl, describes how they have met many times and how he didn’t recognize her each time. She then describes the details of her life and their interactions across the years. It is a beautiful, poignant story. I loved this passage from the story very much.
“…for there is nothing on earth like the love of a child that passes unnoticed in the dark because she has no hope : her love is so submissive, so much a servant’s love, passionate and lying in wait, in a way that the avid yet unconsciously demanding love of a grown woman can never be. Only lonely children can keep a passion entirely to themselves; others talk about their feelings in company, wear them away in intimacy with friends, they have heard and read a great deal about love, and know that it is a common fate. They play with it as if it were a toy, they show it off like boys smoking their first cigarette. But as for me, I had no one I could take into my confidence, I was not taught or warned by anyone, I was inexperienced and naive; I flung myself into my fate as if into an abyss. Everything growing and emerging in me knew of nothing but you, the dream of you was my familiar friend.”
The second story ‘A Story told in Twilight’ starts as a story told by one person to another as twilight sets in, in the evening. It looks like an imaginary story set in a castle in Scotland where a boy in his middle / late teens – an age which has been described by some writers as too old to be a boy but too young to be a man – this boy meets a woman in the night when he is taking a stroll. They have a passionate time together. The next day at breakfast time, all the women in the house are there in the dining room and everything is quiet like it has always been. The boy tries to find out which of these women he met in the previous evening. He devises ways to discover that. And then he makes a surprising discovery. And then he does something silly, like all love-smitten people do, and makes another shattering discovery which breaks his heart. I won’t tell you more. You have to read the story to find out what happened. I loved this passage from the story. It showcases the beautiful, evocative descriptions that Stefan Zweig frequently gives.
“In an hour’s time it will be night. That will be a wonderful hour, for there is no lovelier sight than the slow fading of sunset colour into shadow, to be followed by darkness rising from the ground below, until finally its black tide engulfs the walls, carrying us away into its obscurity. If we sit opposite one another, looking at each other without a word, it will seem at that hour, as if our familiar faces in the shadow were older and stranger and farther away, as if we had never known them like that, and each of us was seeing the other across a wide space and over many years.”
In the third story, ‘The Debt Paid Late‘, a woman who is a homemaker takes a break from her routine to re-energize herself and goes to a small village in the mountains and stays in an inn. Her plan is to stay there for two weeks, walk in the meadow, read a book, not talk to anyone and spend time in tranquility. But there she meets a man whom she recognizes from her childhood. What happens after that is the rest of the story. The whole story is in the form of a letter that this woman writes to her friend, after the events happened.
The fourth story, ‘Forgotten Dreams‘, is about two people, a woman and a man, who meet years later and remember their attraction for each other during their younger days, and talk about what has happened in their lives and what might have been. I loved this passage from this story.
“The apparently unruly confusion of her fragrant, shining curls was the careful construction of an artist, and in the same way the slight smile that hovered around her lips as she read, revealing her white teeth, was the result of many years of practice in front of the mirror, but had already become a firmly established part of the whole design and could not be laid aside now.”
I liked all the four stories in the book. The first three seemed to have some kind of theme in common – there is a question of identity in each of them. In the first, the identity of the narrator is never discovered though the writer tries to, in the second the identity of the woman is a big surprise, and in the third one, the discovery of the identity of the man brings back old memories. The book is vintage Zweig, with beautiful, flowing prose, beautiful passages and a perfect balance between story-telling and aesthetic beauty. I loved it. I can’t wait to read my next Zweig story now.
Have you read Stefan Zweig’s ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman‘? What do you think about it?
No, I haven’t read it, this is one that is new to me. It sounds good!
Hope you get to read it and like it, Lisa. It is very beautiful. Will look forward to your thoughts. Happy reading!
Vishy,
You might enjoy the 1948 movie based on Letters from an Unknown Woman
This is from my post in November, 2013
The story is psychologically acute in its portrayal of the woman’s life long infatuation. The portrait of the writer as a pleasure seeking near decadent literary aristocrat is just brilliant. This is very much a story of the reading life. It is about a time when reading was a treasured activity. It is a story of pain, loneliness, isolation and obsession. I felt I was there in the final years of the glory that was Vienna before the Nazis.
I have read two of the other stories you talked about. I enjoyed recalling them in your very well done post.
I didn’t know that it was made into a movie! Thanks so much for letting me know! I can’t wait to watch to watch it! I loved what you said about the story is about the reading / literary life. Thanks for stopping by 🙂
[…] Fiction Abonji: Fly Away, Pigeon 1 Ani: The Nameless Day 1 Arnim-Brentano: Goethe’s Correspondence with A Child 1 Bachmann: Malina 1 Bernhard: Three Days 1 Boehning: Swallow Summer 1 Böll: The Clown 1 Brentano: Fairy Tales / The Story of Brave Caspar and the Fair Annerl 1 Camenisch: The Alp 1 Behind the Station 1 Christ: Memoirs of A Superfluous Woman 1 Clavadetscher: Knochenlieder 1 Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz 1 Drvenkar: Sorry 1 2 Ende: The Night of Wishes 1 Erpenbeck: Go, Went, Gone 1 Tand 1 Fallada: Alone in Berlin 1 2 Wolf amongst Wolves 1 Feuchtwanger: The Oppermanns 1 2 Fontane: Effi Briest 1 Frisch: Zurich Transit 1 Gaponenko: Who is Martha? 1 Geltinger: Moor 1 Goethe: Elective Affinities 1 Goetz: Insane 1 Grasnojwa: The Legal Haziness of A Marriage 1 Haffner: Blood Brothers 1 Hansen: This House is Mine 1 Hebel: How A Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog 1 The Treasure Chest 1 Heinrich: Cross of Iron 1 Helle: Euphoria 1 Hensel: Dance by The Canal 1 Hesse: Demian 1 Hilbig: A Temporary State 1 Hofmann: Parable of the Blind 1 Hoppe: Pigaletta 1 Huch: The Last Summer 1 Jelinek: In the Alps 1 The Piano Teacher 1 Jonke: The System of Vienna 1 Jünger: The Glass Bees 1 Kafka: Investigations of a Dog 1 Kehlmann: You Should Have Left 1 Keller: Stories 1 Keun: After Midnight 1 The Artificial Silk Girl 1 Kleist: An Earthquake in Chile 1 Kracht: Imperium – A Fiction of the South Seas 1 Kurbjuweit: Fear 1 Lehn: Aladdin, COB 1 Lernet-Holenia: Mona Lisa 1 Lewitscharroff: Apostoloff 1 Blumenberg 1 Mann: Buddenbrooks: A Literary Conversation 1 2 3 4 Markovíc: Superheldinnen (Superheroines) 1 Meier: Isle of the Dead 1 Meile: 3000€ 1 Perutz: Master of the Day of Judgment 1 Rammstedt: The King of China 1 Roth: Confessions of A Murderer 1 Ruge: In Times of Fading Light 1 Schnitzler: Casanova’s Homecoming 1 Late Fame 1 2 Night Games 1 Sebald: Austerlitz 1 The Description of Unhappiness 1 The Emigrants 1 The Rings of Saturn 1 Vertigo 1 Seethaler: The Tobacconist 1 Seiler: Kruso 1 Speck: Bella Germania 1 Stamm: Seven Years 1 Storm: Grieshuus 1 Suter: Allen and the Dragonflies 1 The Last Weynfeldt 1 Tawada : Memoirs of Polar Bear 1 2 Urzidil: Borderlands 1 Siegelmann’s Journey 1 The Duchess of Alahambra 1 The Last Bell 1 Wagener: You’d Have Larvae Too 1 Wagner: Ice Moon 1 Wander: The Seventh Well 1 Wassermann: Kaspar Hauser – Inertia of the Heart 1 Wolf: August 1 The Quest for Christa T 1 Zeh: Eagles and Angels 1 Zehrer: Das Genie 1 Zweig: Compulsion 1 Journey into the Past 1 The Post-Office Girl 1 Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of A Woman and other stories 1 […]
[…] Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig (German) – Zweig is brilliant as […]