Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

Paperback, 1985

Status

Available

Call number

833.912

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Penguin Books Canada, Limited (1985), Paperback, 368 pages

Description

Fiction. Literature. HTML:Wes Anderson on Stefan Zweig: "I had never heard of Zweig...when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity. I loved this first book. I also read the The Post-Office Girl. The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that were sort of stolen from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to represent Zweig himself �?? our �??Author�?� character, played by Tom Wilkinson, and the theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law. But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph Fiennes, is modelled significantly on Zweig as well." The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings. Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host�??s lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invali… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member JanetinLondon

This is a story about how “doing the right thing” and trying to be kind can lead to terrible, unintended consequences, and about how difficult it is to choose between the unselfish “should” and the more rational, selfish “want”.

Anton Hofmiller, a young officer in the Austro-Hungarian

army, is invited to dinner by a rich landowner in the small town where he is stationed. After the meal, to be polite, he asks the teenaged daughter of the house to dance. But he has not noticed she is “crippled” (this is the term used in the book). She is upset and he is embarrassed, and he rushes away. But the family invites him again and again, so he decides the least he can do is keep her company when he can, and he becomes a regular visitor to the house. She, of course, takes it for much more than he does, and is soon fantasizing of their being together once she is “cured”. (We, the readers, realize this will never happen – it is not clear what the various characters believe). He is horrified to learn of her strong feelings, and is also further drawn in by knowingly but unthinkingly fanning her hopes of recovery after a conversation with her doctor. He doesn’t love her, and he knows she will never be cured. He is torn between, on the one hand, his guilt at letting things get this far, coupled with his certain knowledge that the truth could, literally, kill her, and on the other hand his desperate desire to escape the situation by whatever means possible. He goes back and forth, basing his words and actions on these opposing desires. As the book is set in the summer of 1914, we do in fact know how he “escapes”, but we don’t know how the relationship and the story end until we get there.

In addition to the story, the setting is also great. The small provincial town, the army garrison, constantly training, never fighting. The dinners, the cafes, the card playing, the uniforms, the horses, the regulations, the streets, the boredom, and the mix of nationalities that made up the empire. All very evocative. It reminded me strongly of The Radetzsky March, which I also read this year.

What really makes this book great, though, is the style. The story is a story, being told some 20 years after the events. Told in the first person by Hofmiller, it isn’t to us, but to another character we meet briefly in a prologue, never to be seen directly again. In fact the whole book begins with a different story, with the narrator telling us that he met a friend who, spotting Hofmiller, told the narrator that he was a famous WWI hero, and told him the story of that heroism. When the narrator meets Hofmiller subsequently, Hofmiller bitterly describes his real, unheroic self, and this is the story of the book. Along the way there are many other “story” episodes – someone tells Hofmiller how the landowner came by his wealth, the girl’s doctor tells of the various cures he has tried on her, another tells how the doctor has married a blind patient he could not cure but did not want to abandon, an ex-colleague who has left the regiment and become rich tells Hofmiller of his terrible troubles along the way, trying to dissuade him from following the same path, and Hofmiller finishes by telling the narrator of his experience of the war and subsequent events. I personally find this a very powerful style, which Zweig adopted very well from his other, all much shorter, works to this, his only long novel. I loved it.

I don’t know if there is more than one translation, but the one I read was by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt.

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LibraryThing member starbox

'that compassionate lie had made her happy, and to make someone happy can never be wrong or a crime',, July 1, 2014

This review is from: Beware of Pity (Kindle Edition)
This is the story of a dashing young Austrian lieutenant, just prior to the first World War. Stationed on the Hungarian border, he

is thrilled to be invited to the castle of a wealthy local family, but bemused when his request to the daughter of the house for a dance is greeted by copious weeping. When he discovers his faux pas - she's a cripple - he feels obliged to send her flowers. And thus begins his link to the family - 'my strange case of poisoning of pity'. For as his feelings of duty and honour are taken to mean much more by the lame Edith, the weak and vacillating Lt Hofmiller is torn between shame before his colleagues at the possible match and his desire to do the right thing. As he is warned:

'Pity is a double-edged weapon. If you don't know how to handle it you had better not touch it, and above all you must steel your heart against it. Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first...if you don't get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.'

A brilliantly written novel; like his other work, 'The Post Office Girl', Zweig keeps you reading to the end, uncertain how the story will work out.

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LibraryThing member franoscar

A "real" novel. The framework consists of a man who meets the main character, who was a hero in the first world war. The time is 1937, and both the outer narrator & the main character believe that war is coming. They leave a party together and the main character tells his story to the outer

narrator (I don't know what else to call him), who claims responsibility for casting the story into a coherent narrative and then the vast majority of the book is the story told by the main character. It is a sad story, about how he was a young man touched by pity for a crippled girl, and was drawn into actions & relationships he didn't choose & didn't know how to handle because of the pity that he felt for her & her family. It also talks a lot about how an individual has difficulty standing against the dominant ideas of his cultural group. The main character takes responsibility for his failings, but maybe the doctor was asking too much of such a young & unformed man. It is very well done.

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LibraryThing member Luli81

A great novel, hard to follow for its increasing carrying guilt of the main character.

LibraryThing member hemlokgang

Stefan Zweig's treatise on the dark nature of pity is a fantastic read for several reasons. The plot is a page turner with deeply developed characters such as the narrator, Anton Hofmiller, an Austrian cavalry officer who struggles with the inner voices of pity, honor, and self-indulgence. There is

Edith von Kekesfalva the beautiful, tempestuous lame girl whose ambivalence about her plight is the cause of the undoing of multiple characters and Doctor Condor, the physician who espouses fascinating ideas about the medical profession in general and Edith in particular. Those are just three of the characters! The use of language is marvelous, which means that all three of my personal criteria for outstanding literature, plot, character, and language, have been met and then some! 350 pages flew by!

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LibraryThing member xieouyang

The more I read Zweig the more I like his writings. This particular one is a great novel I think. It has a strange beginning- strange because the narrative of the first few pages is ignored in the rest of the novel. It starts as a conversation that a character has with what he thought was a war

hero (hero of Austrian army in the 1st world war). The "hero" starts narrating his story and that takes the rest of the book- Zweig never returns to the original character who listened to the story. Kind of strange I thought.

Nonetheless, the bulk of the story is great. Deals with the feelings and anguish of the young lieutenant who gets involved with a wealthy family, particularly with the crippled daughter, out of pity for the young girl. It's a fascinating novel following up on the sentimental dilemmas that the lieutenant has. At the beginning he is taken away by the fact that the family is treating him not as a soldier but as a real human being. His feelings and thoughts are appreciated by them. As the story evolves he is almost carrying two lives- one with the wealthy family, the Kekesfalvas, and the other with his fellow officers in the barracks who know very little about his doings with the Kekesfalvas, other than he apparently eats there every night and treats him well.

But as time goes, he realizes that he is driven by pity for the young girl. Also, the young girl has fallen in love with him, a feeling that he can't correspond. So he is torn by these feelings - loyalty to the family, but also repugnance to himself for taking advantage of them.

This is a great moral story. What is the duty of us humans? Do we only seek our own self-satisfaction or do we sacrifice for others? Especially for those less fortunate who have been dealt an unfair hand.

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LibraryThing member ariesblue

the story of a young woman who is a paraplegic as the result of a horse riding accident. and she come to know an officer who has cheered her up after she have been depressed after she knew that she has no hope for her recovery.......
very sad story

LibraryThing member jwhenderson

Before the First World War, Hofmiller, a young Austrian officer from a modest background, finds himself stationed in a town where he knows few people. He scores an invitation to the home of the richest local family and, at the end of the evening, realises he has not spent time with their attractive

daughter, Edith. He invites her to dance, but realises – to everyone’s horror – that she is sitting in a wheelchair and can’t even stand. The worst faux pas imaginable, and he flees. But he is given another chance, which he eagerly accepts. To be nice he starts spending more and more time with the family, focusing on Edith, keeping her company – keeping himself company too. Relationships seem almost balanced at first. She’s sweet, if a bit over-eager for his attention. It is the father, though, who compels Hofmiller to involve himself more, to help find treatment for her condition, to lie to her about its effectiveness, to let her believe she has a chance of recovery. It’s all, of course, in the name of keeping her happy. Hofmiller’s eagerness to please, Edith’s father’s eagerness to please – beyond what is practical or real – subtly becomes a ticking bomb of anxiety. Where it naturally leads is to Hofmiller’s proposal of marriage. A good soldier, he will do everything he can. Devastation everywhere.

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LibraryThing member MarkBeronte

Many people lives lives ruled by emotion. This is a novel that questions the wisdom of such an idea.

LibraryThing member ivanfranko

This is a brilliant page turner. Read Stefan Zweig, and be drawn into the web of great story telling.

LibraryThing member evatkaplan

9.5
Soldier in the Austro Hungarian Army in 1914 asks a wealthy girl to dance without realizing she is a paraplegic. He takes PITY on her and visits her daily. She falls in love with him. He has only PITY for her, and is very afraid what OTHERS will say. should he let PITY control his actions and he

is very unhappy but she will be happy or should he let his true feelings be known, but she may commit suicide? what is our responsibility to others and to ourselves?

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LibraryThing member soylentgreen23

Zweig's only completed novel, 'Beware of Pity' is a study of what happens when we let our weakness overpower us, and the terrible consequences that can befall those we show pity to without really meaning it with sincerity. A fine achievement, if a little long - ironic, given the common complaint

that Zweig's novellas could do with being longer...

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LibraryThing member sirk.bronstad

I could not sleep because I could not stop thinking about how the main story starts off nested into another narrative which it never returns to. I’m not quite sure why this lack of symmetry bugged me. Maybe it’s symbolic of some deep effect the novel had on me that I otherwise cannot access. An

honest narrator.

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