First published in German in 1927; published in translation by Pushkin Press on September 6, 2016
A woman who takes up with an “elegant and handsome” young Frenchman and leaves her “stout, provincial husband” during a family vacation at the beach becomes the focal point of a strident argument among other hotel guests. Most guests at the narrator’s table assume that the woman had been having an affair and had conspired with the Frenchman to meet, as if by chance, for the purpose of running away together. They refuse to believe that a woman would abandon her husband and children on a whim. The narrator suggests that an unhappy woman might do just that in a moment of passion. The outraged discussion that follows is only diffused by the gentling remarks of an elderly, upper-class woman from England.
The conversation sparks the elderly woman to tell the narrator her own story. It is the story of a transformative encounter with a despairing stranger when the woman was in her 40s, years after her husband’s death. The stranger suffers from a compulsion that threatens to be his undoing. As she endeavors to save the man from himself, the woman is overwhelmed by a compulsion of her own.
Stefan Zweig plumbs the depths of the woman’s mind, dissecting it for the reader’s inspection. Her story is a confession, a remembrance of pain, an unburdening of shame, a reminder of how easily uncontrolled passion becomes uncontrollable pain. It is also the story of how the memory of a single day can become so deeply rooted that living with it for decades changes the person who bears it. The story invites the reader to ask about the value of passionate love -- whether it is worth the risk of losing everything we have to embrace something we are missing. The novella covers vast ground in fewer than a hundred pages as it invites the reader to feel and understand all that lies within the woman’s tortured soul.
The translation from German is by Anthea Bell. I haven’t read this is German so all I can say about the translation is that the prose is both fluid and strong.
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