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Stefan Zweig gained early fame as a poet, translator, and biographer. When he added fiction to his repertoire, his work was critically acclaimed. However, Zweig has fallen into an undeserved obscurity, and unlike the works of his contemporaries and admirers--fellow Austrian and German writers such as Thomas Man, Herman Hesse, and Sigmund Freud--Zweig's writings have become almost completely unavailable to the English-speaking audience. The Royal Game and Other Stories is a collection of five of his brilliant creative achievements, revives Zweig's art, making it once again available to a wide range of readers. Spanning his entire career, the stories included--""The Royal Game,"" ""Amok,"" ""Letter from an Unknown Woman,"" ""The Burning Secret,"" and ""Fear""--each reveal an individual's passionate response to life. Toying with the theme of the mind left to itself, Zweig gives the reader everything from the story of a child's distrust of his mother to one of a man driven to insanity by his imaginary chess games. Zweig's enormous interest in psychology and psychological problems combine with early century settings to provide compelling stories that prove Zweig to be a master of psychological narrative. Through the years, the stories of Stefan Zweig have been hailed as intense and memorable psychological thrillers--adventures of the mind--with wide, universal appeal. The five masterpieces in this book reveal why Zweig has earned such praise, and should help his legacy continue on to a new generation of readers.… (more)
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Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881 to wealthy parents and became a poet, translator, biographer and novelist. His life ended dramatically when he and his wife committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 after being
The Royal Game (or Chess Story) was the last thing he wrote. The other stories in this collection are: Amok, The Burning Secret, Fear, and Letter From An Unknown Woman. For the most part, they are all stories of obsession (e.g., "chess-poisoning") or mental cat and mouse games where you're not always sure who's the cat and who's the mouse. There is a feverish quality to all the stories which I really got caught up in.
My favorite was probably Letter From An Unknown Woman about a famous novelist who receives a letter in an unknown handwriting addressed only "To you who never really knew me." There is no return address and no signature. It turns out to be a letter from a woman who has loved the novelist since she was 13 years old. "Nothing on earth equals the unseen, hidden love of a child, because it is so without hope, so servile, so submissive, so observant and intense, as the covetous and unconciously demanding love of a grown woman never is." (p. 223) The writer of the letter is now an adult who fears she may be dying of influenza and wants the novelist to know how much she loved him. "You'll receive this testament from me only when I'm dead--from one who loved you more than anyone else and whom you didn't recognise; from one who always waited for you but for whom you never sent." (p. 249) The big question is will the novelist figure out who sent the letter.
Another one I really liked was The Burning Secret. It's about a sickly, young boy recuperating at a resort with his mother whose boring days suddenly change with the arrival of a fascinating young bachelor on vacation who takes an interest in him. The boy's "face didn't altogether lack good looks but its character was as yet unformed. The battle between manhood and childhood seemed scarcely to have begun." (p. 103) The bachelor turns out to be an aristocratic baron who has hunted elephants in India and who is also a "woman hunter." The story is about what happens when it dawns on the boy that the bachelor is really interested in his mother, not him.
I'm giving this book 4 1/2 stars. I really enjoyed the stories but they are similar in tone and I would recommend reading them one at time with a break in between. They're all about 50 pages long and I'd make sure you had time to read each story straight through because once you start, you'll want to know how it ends.
4.5 stars.