The Post Office Girl

by Stefan Zweig

Paperback, 2009

Status

Available

Call number

833.912

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Sort Of Books (2009), Paperback, 288 pages

Description

Classic Literature. 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." 2009 PEN Translation Prize Finalist The logic of capitalism, boom and bust, is unremitting and unforgiving. But what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world? In The Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism.Christine toils in a provincial post office in post�World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine�s rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same. Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within. Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde in Zweig�s haunting and hard-as-nails novel, completed during the 1930s, as he was driven by the Nazis into exile, but left unpublished at the time of his death. The Post-Office Girl, available here for the first time in English, transforms our image of a modern master�s achievement.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member lauralkeet

Christine Hoflehner is the administrator of a tiny Austrian village post office in the 1920s. Only 28 years old, she lives with her sickly mother, attempting to provide for two people on her meager salary. Her life is confined to her remote village, and varies little from day-to-day. Then,

seemingly out of nowhere, her aunt and uncle invite her to join them on holiday. Claire (the aunt) left Austria as a young woman, married a successful American business man, and has a lifestyle beyond Christine's imagination. Christine travels by train to Switzerland; her first view of the Alps is the beginning of her transformation:
She's been living as though all this didn't exist, never saw it, hardly cared to; like a fool she dozed off in this tiny little room ... just a night away, a day away from this infinitude, these manifold immensities! Indifferent and without desires before, now she begins to realize what she's been missing. This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel's disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel. (p. 34)

On arrival at the Swiss resort, Christine feels uncomfortable and out-of-place with all the wealthy patrons. The status-conscious Claire whisks Christine away to a beauty salon, followed by a shopping spree, and Christine blossoms under the attention. She begins to assimilate into the resort community, passing as a wealthy socialite and becoming the center of attention both with her contemporaries and some of the older guests.

And then suddenly it all comes to an end, and Christine returns to her village and her monotonous post office job. Experience with a life of luxury makes living without all the more difficult. After a few weeks, feeling stifled, she traveled to Vienna on her day off:
She didn't know why she was going there, had no clear idea what she wanted, other than to get away, away from the village, from her work, from herself, from the person she was condemned to be. She just wanted to feel the wheels turning beneath her again, see lights, see different people, ones with more intelligence and style, ... to be a different person, not the same old one. (p. 158)

In Vienna she meets Ferdinand, a young man of the same age bearing horrible emotional scars from the war. Together they show the impact of the war on everyday men and women. Christine lost loved ones in the war and lived with years of economic hardship. Ferdinand saw the war first-hand; afterward he was unable to afford education, and was equally unable to find work. They bond out of a shared sense of desperation, and craft a daring, last-ditch attempt to improve their circumstances.

Stefan Zweig paints a vivid portrait of Austria following World War I: profound loss, widespread poverty, and an overall sense of hopelessness and desperation. Zweig himself left his native country during the rise of Nazism, and, along with his wife, committed suicide. Published posthumously, The Post-Office Girl offers insight to the motives leading to Zweig's last act.

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LibraryThing member cameling

Would it really be a kindness to take a person living their entire life thus far in dull poverty and transport them for 8 days into the very lap of capitalistic luxury, in full knowledge that at the end of the vacation, they would be returned to their previous life?

Christine was one such person,

living in post-war Austria with her ailing mother, knowing nothing but poverty and a dreary job in her little town's post office. Her wealthy American aunt, having a sudden attack of conscience, decides to invite her to spend 2 weeks with her in Switzerland. Our mousey unassuming Christine is almost paralyzed with fear when she arrives, believing herself to be unworthy of such luxury, and embarrassed by her old and unfashionable clothes and suitcase. But after an afternoon of shopping with her aunt for new clothes and shoes, and a stylish haircut, Christine emerges like a new butterfly. Unused to being surrounded by beauty, luxury, and elegant society, she flits about and her innocent delight with everyone and everything she sees sets a glow about her, enchanting and alluring. Our shy post office girl relishes her new found confidence and spirited joy.

But without warning, her aunt brusquely sends her back home, back to her old job, back to her joyless life. Her mother passes away while she's on her way back. To Christine, life could not be more bleak in comparison to the careless frivolity she enjoyed just a short while ago. She's no longer kind nor generous with her time to her neighbors and those who come to the post office. She wears her bitterness like a thick coat around herself, impenetrable and puzzling to all who had known her.

She visits her sister's family in Vienna, and meets Ferdinand, a veteran of the war, and an equally bitter soul. Bitter because he's been discarded by society and the government like an old odd sock since his return from Siberia. The 2 of them form an awkward relationship. It's not one that either finds particularly joyful but it's one they cling to because they understand each other's bitterness. Their increasing anger and disappointments takes them to a turning point in their lives.

This is an absorbing work and one that is masterfully crafted. It's also one that lingers in the reader's mind after the last page has been turned.

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LibraryThing member msf59

It’s post World War I Austria. Christine works in a provincial post office. She is only in her mid-20s but is all-ready feeling the weight and dreariness of the middle-aged. She’s unmarried and shares a gloomy hovel with her disabled mother. She has no friends and no social life. One day, she

receives a telegram from her wealthy Aunt. An invitation to join them in a mountain resort in Switzerland. Christine accepts and finds herself transformed, thrown into a world of luxury, romance and opulence. Unfortunately, this only lasts a short time and she suddenly finds herself disgraced and sent back home, where her life will never be the same again.
This is the second book I’ve read by Zweig, who died tragically, nearly seventy years ago and what an amazing find he is. His prose is vibrant and impassioned, leaving the reader yearning for more. Highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl

This is Stefan Zweig's last novel. Christine lost the best years of her life to the First World War, which began when she was just 16 and which also took her father, her brother, her family's wealth and her mother's health. Through connections, she manages to find a job as a post office clerk in an

isolated village. The salary, barely adequate for one, is stretched to also care for her mother and means that they live as unwelcome tenants in a damp attic room. Now in her late twenties, Christine lives a quiet life, until an aunt and uncle, visiting from America, invites her to stay with with them in a Swiss resort town.

Christine blossoms under the care and luxury of this alien life. She dances and laughs with witty, well-dressed men and discovers a new way of looking at life, but eventually and too soon, she returns to her old life as the post office girl and finds that she can't return to her earlier acceptance of her straightened circumstances.

The Post Office Girl is beautifully written and so perfectly captures Christine's inner feelings as she moves from blind acceptance to elation to a clear-eyed awareness of the bleakness of her life. The War to End All Wars destroyed more than young men's lives and the economic depression that followed robbed many of all hope, while the well-off danced, blithely unaware of the suffering around them.

I'd expected this to be a serious and somewhat dour read, but found instead an impossible to put down novel about a vibrant woman destroyed by circumstances beyond her control. It's not a feel-good story, but it's also not without hope and the ending was pitch perfect and occurred at the right moment.

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LibraryThing member keylawk

In this historical fiction set in 1926, we are introduced to Christine Hoflehner, a young postal clerk in the Austrian village of Klein-Reifling. The war has taken her father, her brother, her best prospects for marriage, and her laughter. She lives in a damp, cold attic with her rheumatic mother.

The gloom of her days is broken by a telegram from her aunt Claire, gone to America years before. Claire is now rich, and she invites her niece to join her at an elegant resort in Switzerland.
Clutching her straw suitcase, Christine creeps into the grand hotel, and promptly finds herself transformed physically--by hairdressers and Claire's wardrobe--and in the shift of class expectation, by the wand of chance and misunderstanding. Her invitation into high society was a happy coincidence of her own emergence as an attractive young woman. She dances, takes rides in roadsters, and is courted by gentlemen. Just as life seems to pull her into its fullness, a jealous acquaintance discovers the pretense. Fearing exposure of her own long-dead secrets, Claire sends Christine and her straw suitcase, packing. Back in the village, Christine's prospects seem even more dismal for the certainty she has of what she has missed. But this is just the beginning.
The novel moves out of the grand hotel, to the sleepy village, and then toward a more complex counterpoint of social spheres. Christine visits her sister Nelly's family in Vienna. Her sister's chubby mercantile husband introduces her to Ferdinand, his comrade from the war who spent years in a Siberian prison camp, only to return to a country that no longer had any use for him. His family favors evaporated in the hyperinflation, and his instant poverty is insured by injuries which specifically disable him from his pursuit of architecture. When Ferdinand pours out the bitterness of his heart, Christine recognizes a kindred spirit. Yet, their relations never become obvious. There is no "happily" or even "love", but it is by no means incomplete. Their lives are deeply described and rooted in a historical context. We come to appreciate what war does to people, to a whole generation. The two souls cling to each other, but this does not make them less immune to the withered circumstances in which they live.
At the end, the couple contemplate suicide, and then, almost unintentionally, conspire to commit a serious felonious theft. In the insightful Afterword, William Deresiewicz notes: "The narrative terminates at the conclusion of a scene, and on a thematically significant word." That word, pregnant with Joycean revenance in the mouth of a woman, is "Yes".

The Nazis destroyed the European civilization achieved in the Austro-Hungarian humanist movement. Herr Zweig provides a clear window on the golden age of Viennese cafe society at the turn of the century. The author received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915 and was arguably the most prolific, popular and widely-known author of his day. He seems to have read widely and wrote as if on a mission to preserve civilization as doom descended upon it. Zweig escaped the camps but his death in 1942 in Brazil was a double-suicide with his wife, and is portended in this novel, published in Germany as "Rausch der Verwandlung" [Intoxication of Transformation] after his death.

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LibraryThing member catarina1

A new author for me. I had not heard of him until there were discussions on LT about him. This book was quite a pleasant read and I will probably read more by this author. (The copy that I read was published by the NY Review of Books, one of their "Classics". The web site lists all of the books

they publish, quite an interesting list, from a wide range of authors.)

The story takes place in post-WWI Austria and the privations of that era play a role in the story.

Christine lives in a small town and has a more-or less- secure job as a government employee but also feels trapped by both the job and the small town. She is invited by an aunt to spend a vacation at a luxury resort and she gets swept away by the opulence there, the privileges of that life. She is devastated when it is taken away. And that sets the stage for the second part of the book.

Money plays a major role in the story - "the vast power of money, mighty when you have it and even mightier when you don't, with its divine gift of freedom and the demonic fury it unleashes on those forced to do without it.

Zweig's words will melt you, will make you "know" the characters, even if you don't really like them.

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LibraryThing member xieouyang

Although I do not agree with the underlying and final premise of the story, that criminal behavior against the state is excusable because life has been a rough one, I found the story engrossing and its conclusion almost inevitable. The post-office girl, the principal subject of the story, is as the

title implies a girl in charge of a post-office in some out of the way Austrian town. She has had a very rough life, with misfortunes followed by misfortunes. At the beginning of the story, she is taking care of her ill mother and barely able to make ends meet. She has to watch her expenses from day to day and is hardly ever able to purchase something for herself that would give her enjoyment. She is almost totally destitute with a very dire future. The apparent satisfaction with her current life is broken when she gets invited to spend two weeks vacation in a high-end resort hotel by a sister of her mother who just returned from America. There she is exposed to a life she never thought of, even dreamed off. But it was a life of reckless abandoment, complete careless enjoyment, until it's cut short by the jealousy of her aunt's husband. She is sent back to her home town to her post-office job.
Back in the dreary, daily work at the post-office she has a difficult time adjusting, thinking back to the good like she had albeit momentarily. She becomes very resentful. She meets a friend of her sister's husband, who had been a prisoner of war for several years and had tried to get back to a normal job but couldn't get any permanent job because of his war injuries. He also sees himself as a victim of the state. He brings up the idea of stealing the funds from the post-office, when he finds out that at some time during the month the post-office has several tens of thousands of shillings.
The book ends with a cool discussion and agreement between both of them that they will comit the crime and steal the funds.
This is the part that I found objectionable. The discussion of whether or not to steal is put within the context of analyzing the likelihood of getting caught, and the kind of life they would lead after the act. But there is very little concern for the moral or ethical aspects of stealing the funds. Also, no possible remorse for doing it.
Nonetheless, this is a story that I would recommend. It's very well written.

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LibraryThing member hazelk

The novel is set in the aftermath of the First World War in Austria: The Austro-Hungarian Empire is no more and for the average citizen life is tough with high prices and shortages.

The post office girl of the title is Christine, a twenty-something postmistress in a remote village miles from Vienna.

She leads a life of routine, of penny-pinching economies, supporting her widowed mother: she has never been in love nor even had a boyfriend.

Out of the blue she is given the opportunity by wealthy American relatives to spend a fortnight with them in a grand hotel in Switzerland, all expenses paid. In a Cinderella-like fashion they supply her with fine new clothes (so that neither she nor they are shown up), pay for her to have a more flattering hair-do etc. She is soon transformed from a gauche young woman to a confident one, excited by the admiring looks of men, by fine dining, by luxury.

But Zweig is not a writer of romances: even before the end of Part One we know that no white knight will sweep her off her feet and take her from a life of drudgery.

Part Two is much darker in tone. And unfortunately, without giving the plot away, the writing is less good: whereas in Part One the descriptions were powerful and alive with great psychological insights, Part Two is worthy but rather boring: there are great long sections of declamatory speech by Ferdinand who she has met in Vienna, a confused embittered radical.

Only when I read the afterword did I realise why the book wasn’t published until 1982, forty years after the author’s suicide.

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LibraryThing member pgmcc

This is the story about a young girl whose family has been ruined by the privations of the First World War. Her brother marched off to war and died. Her father’s business, taxidermy, disappeared in the war years and the loss of his son drove him to despair and ultimately death.

Christine, the main

character, was a teenager when the war started and after the war she ends up in a remote village working in the post office and looking after her aging mother. She is a dedicated worker and, although she knows her life is hard and that she has not felt happy since her brother left for the war, she does not object about her lifestyle.

A long estranged aunt, who left for the United States long before war broke out, makes contact and Christine is dispatched to meet her aunt in Switzerland where the aunt is holidaying with her wealthy husband.

Christine get a taste of the high life and this unsettles her normal acceptance of her lot back at the remote village.

Needless to say the real drama of the book is concerned with how she settles back into what was her life before the holiday with the aunt.

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LibraryThing member onehotrobot

Started kind of slow, but soon I was totally enthralled by this little story. It actually even hit close to home a bit. Grew up in a small, unimportant town and faced with adversity at every turn. Went away, had a great job and a magical life for a few years before it was suddenly snatched away -

forcing me to return to my hometown to live with my parents. It was serendipitous to be reading this book when I was just facing my own disgust at my re-introduced provincial life. That anger is normal. Christine finds a person who understands the misery she has of experiencing respite from a hopeless life then being shipped back before she even fully realized what happened, and they manage to find a way to end their (separate but equal) suffering together.

It's at once a fairy tale and a grim reminder of misery, suffering and the lengths a human will take to make it go away.

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LibraryThing member Course8

Who am I? Who am I? This is what the lead character whispers as she looks in the mirror in her opulent hotel room. She has been transformed from Christine,a dour postal clerk, to Christiane,a beautiful social butterfly, through the largesse of an aunt. She lost the ability to express joy as she

experienced the loss of a brother, a father and a comfortable life during WWI. She now toils away as a clerk and cares for her invalid mother, struggling in poverty. Invited to join her aunt and uncle for a two week period at a fancy resort, within twelve hours after her arrival with pitiful clothes packed in a single straw bag, her aunt has showered her with new clothes, haircut and makeup. She blossoms into a vivacious, enchanting young woman who attracts lots of attention. Alas, the ball ends abruptly and Cinderella does not live happily ever after.

After returning to her small Austrian home town she is angry. Not that her mother died while Christine was away, but that the town and the people are as meager as ever and not a catalyst for the continued existence of joyful Christiane. She seeks excitement by traveling to Vienna. Though she might might walk into the lobby of the opera or sit in a restaurant, she realizes that she remains outsider.

She finds solace in a WWI vet who is also mired in poverty and bitter over his inability to overcome the lost time and opportunities because of years he spent in Siberia and his inability, at the age of 30, to get his life back on track. When she looks at him she sees his angular, bitter face sometimes morphing into the innocent and excited face of the innocent 19 -year-old that he was before the war. So who is he, really. Their relationship is not love, it is shared misery.

At the end of the story, as in the beginning, money is the strongest catalyst for Christine's life.

Despite the somber and sad arc of the story, the writing is entrancing.

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LibraryThing member brenzi

”The war has in fact ended, but poverty has not. It only ducked beneath the barrage of ordinances, crawled foxily behind the paper ramparts of war loans and banknotes with their ink still wet. Now it’s creeping back out, hollow-eyed, broad muzzled, hungry, and bold, eating what’s left in the

gutters of the war. An entire winter of denominations and zeroes snows down from the sky, hundreds of thousands, millions, but every flake, every thousand melts in your hand. Money dissolves while you’re sleeping, it flies away while you’re changing your shoes (coming apart, with wooden heels) to run to the market for a second time; you never stop moving, but you’re always late. Life becomes mathematics, addition, multiplication, a mad whirl of figures and numbers, a vortex that snatches the last of your possessions into its black insatiable vacuum: your mother’s gold hair clasp off your neck, her wedding ring off her finger, the damask cloth off the table. But no matter how much you toss in, it’s no use, you can’t plug the black hellish hole, it does no good to stay up late knitting wool sweaters and rent all your rooms out and use the kitchen as a bedroom, doubling up with someone else.”

Stefan Zweig was a master at being able to make you feel what abject poverty really felt like. His descriptions of it literally tear your heart out. Set after WWI in the 1920s, Austria is a particularly harrowing place to be. The eponymous post office girl, Christine Hoflehner, is a civil servant who maintains the office in the inconsequential village of Klein-Reifling, two hours outside Vienna. Her meager salary allows her and her very ill mother to maintain a tiny attic space in the village. But she has an aunt who married a wealthy American and has extended an invitation to Christine to spend two weeks with them at a posh Swiss resort so Christine goes. Her aunt is at once cognizant of the fact that her niece has neither the clothes nor the bearing to be accepted by the clientele as ‘one of them’ so she takes her shopping and Christine is transformed. And Zweig switches gears and as deftly as he described poverty he now describes the world of the very wealthy ‘where unspoken wishes are granted. How could anyone be anything but happy here?’ But something happens. Someone she thought had become a friend has been inquiring into her background and apparently the jig is up. Christine is shocked when her aunt decides to check out of the hotel abruptly and go on to another posh spot and Christine is not invited along so she must return to her former life.

That is when she meets Ferdinand, a man whose experiences in captivity in Russia and his return to the very challenging employment opportunities in Austria have left him bitter and desperate. And Christine realizes that she is complete agreement with this sorry soul. Things are as bad as she thought they were. They hatch a scheme after a few meetings and the story ends on a sour note.

This may be the most depressing book I’ve ever read. But Zweig’s ability to make me feel extreme sadness in one moment and exhilaration the next is an ability not many authors have. And his command of language makes him an instant favorite with me. Just an astounding read and very highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member owen1218

A well-written and engaging novel. But am I really supposed to believe this presents an anti-capitalist sentiment? Am I supposed to pity the circumstances of the characters? On the contrary I pitied their snobbery and their dreams of living a vapid consumerist life. I found it depressing, and hoped

Christine would snap out of it. But in the end it becomes clear that Zweig wanted us to feel sympathetic to these wealth addicts, to support them in their final decision. I found it very bizarre, and a bit hard to believe. But it does begin to make sense when you realize that the author was an aristocrat himself, born to a family of wealthy bankers and textile manufacturers.

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LibraryThing member pathogenik

This is a page-turning story about capitalism, post-war generation, and poverty. It talks about how money rules your life. It is about the class struggle. Very nice read, i enjoyed it. And to think it was written in the 1930's and still speaks to our times!

Actually, I have known someone like Franz:

a macho, controlling, whiny, poor, miserable victim of his society. I have to say that I didn't like the characters, I did sympathize with them, but I couldn't relate to their personalities, only to their circumstances. There are some wonderful quotes in this book, I am very glad I have read this one, and am looking forward to reading more Zweig. The ending is satisfying.

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LibraryThing member michaelbartley

Christine, the main character in this sad, moving, and powerful story works in a post office in Austria after ww1. Her life is at best gray. At times depressing. She is a young woman with no future living in a village that has no culture or beauty. Are you depressed yet! By change her mother's

sister that had escaped the family before the war and married a very rich man invites her to spend time with her in a resort in the Swiss Alps. Suddenly Christine is show a whole new world of beauty, luxery, a world that has a future, a world where hope exist. When her aunt sends her away Christine's old world is even more depressing and dark. This a dark book about lifes many lifes in which joy and hope are at best fleeting.

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LibraryThing member oparaxenos

Zweig's novel starts off quite well, with a gripping portrayal of the shame and humiliation that come with being poor. The reader really gets to like his character and then like her less and less as the book goes on. About two-thirds of the way through the book the plot seems to run out of gas, and

the ending was rather disappointing.

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LibraryThing member Ianaf

An extremely well written book - Zweig captures people's emotions and feelings so simply and yet accurately. The storyline is described rather overtly on the NYRB backcover. I wonder if Zweig intended a third part ? and the second half rather foreshadows his own life in Brazil.

LibraryThing member blackhornet

The first page had me hooked. I thought I was going to get a classic modernist take on Germany between the wars. Thereafter, however, the writing was leaden, the narrative dull.

LibraryThing member fuzzy_patters

The Post-Office Girl is about a woman who works in a small town Post Office in Austria who becomes frustrated with her social status and is led to consider extreme measures to get out of her situation. The story takes place just after World War I, with the effects of the war on the Austrian people

and economy playing a large role in the story. Fiercely anti-capitalist in sentiment, The Post Office Girl contrasts the postal employee, Christl, with the posh extravagances expended by the aristocracy of the countries who benefited from the war, notably British and American citizens. The freedom of the aristocrats to live life as they choose leads Christl to her final dilemma and the novel's thrilling finish.

While well written and engaging, I found The Post-Office Girl to be frustrating. Christl was completely incapable of seeing any value in her lower middle class background, even when confronted with people poorer then herself or when she had weekends in Vienna to look forward to. She came off as rather maudlin in her belief that her life was so terrible. She had a job, a pension, and a lover in another city while thousands of her countrymen were living in abject poverty due to hyperinflation after the war. I found it difficult to sympathize with her, which took away some of the joy of reading the book.

Despite all of its flaws, I can't really say that I didn't like the book. I was merely frustrated with it. I actually found it to be very well written and difficult to put down. The characters seemed very real and I truly cared what happened to them, and the book did help the reader to understand how the Austrian citizens felt about themselves and their government after the war. If not for the frustrating attitudes of the characters, it would be a really great novel. Instead, it is merely good but is definitely worth reading.

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LibraryThing member alex1234

I like Zweig very much because the circumstances in which his characters find themselves reveal a lot about what it is like to be human. Many can identify with the main character, but Zweig also places some distance between the reader and the protagonist that allows the former to see painful events

unfolding before the latter does. This is very clear in Beware of Pity, and appears toward the end of this novel.

On a more technical note, I would not recommend reading the back-cover if you have not already done so. A sentence there has an important spoiler, and I'm surprised NYRB allowed it. It doesn't take away from the fun of reading, but it does reduce part of the excitement in the last 50 pages or so.

Anyway, I would recommend this book, and pretty much anything by Zweig.

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LibraryThing member charlie68

Ends too soon, but still a well-written book. A lot of familiar themes, small town girl goes to a posh resort, and hijinks ensues.

LibraryThing member janeajones

Frankly I was disappointed with Zweig's last, unfinished novel as I had read a number of glowing reviews of it and most of the NYRB books I have read have been highly satisfying. This one not so much.

Zweig paints a compelling picture of a lost generation in post-WWI Austria contrasted with the

luxurious life enjoyed by the wealthy in a glamourous Swiss resort. However, the main characters, Christl and her suitor Ferdinand, are self-pitying and hapless. I don't know what Zweig had in store for them, but I don't really care.

My Kindle version did not have the Afterword mentioned in some of the reviews.

I own one other book by Zweig, Balzac: A Biography which I will give a chance, but it will have to be much more engaging than this one for me to look for any more of his work.

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LibraryThing member Olivermagnus

The title character is Christine Hoflehner, postal clerk in the Austrian village of Klein-Reifling in 1926 postwar Austria. She shares a damp and humid attic room with her sickly mother. Her youth and happiness has been stolen in the war, along with her father and brother. Suddenly a telegram from

her Aunt Claire arrives. Years ago Claire and her husband went to America and become quite wealthy. They are now vacationing in Switzerland and invite Christine to join them. Christine discovers a new and exotic life filled with pleasure and wealth. She's dressed in beautiful clothes and receives attention from attractive and wealthy men. Then suddenly it's over. Aunt Claire fears the discovery of her own secrets and sends Christine back to her miserable life in the village. Now her life there seems intolerable and her anger and bitterness is palpable. Eventually she meets Ferdinand, another miserable war survivor who spent six years in a Siberian labor camp. In Ferdinand she's found her soul mate of misery. Their meeting and their developing relationship takes us through the second half of the book.

This is an beautifully written novel about what it's like to live without hope, and what happens when someone who has nothing is given a chance to see what the good life is like, and then have it taken away from them. It's an absorbing story that also captures the bleakness of life in Austria between the wars. I had some trouble getting into it in the beginning but I'm glad I stuck with it. Just when you think you have a handle on what Christine will do, the novel stops abruptly, but ultimately satisfying, at a place that almost leads you to believe there will be another part to the story.

The book is written in two parts, each totally different from the other. I understand Zweig wrote The Post-Office Girl in the early 1930s, working on it during years that Hitler rose to power. He appears to have considered the book finished, and yet he left it untitled. It was not published in Germany until 1982 and then translated into English in 2008. Zweig committed suicide in a pact with his second wife in Brazil in 1942.

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LibraryThing member Olivermagnus

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LibraryThing member hemlokgang

As I read this novel by Stefan Zweig, the image of a roller coaster ride surfaced in my mind repeatedly. You know the way the car climbs slowly to the summit of each curve then shoots down the slope at high speed, then repeats the pattern again and again? This novel follows that pattern. Zweig's

writing is brilliant! He juxtaposes long descriptive, contemplative passages with mind-boggling pivotal moments in the lives of the characters. The small roller coaster is the string of post WWI experiences of the protagonist, Christine, and eventually with Ferdinand as well. The meta-roller coaster is the sense of loss, lack of meaning, and search for meaning experienced by all who were touched by the war. Zweig's use of language, his characters, and his plot make this a memorable read!

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