Amok and other Stories

Translated by Anthea Bell
Ebook (EPUB)
On sale Feb 20, 2007 | 144 Pages | 9781906548544
A doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty culminates in an almost lyrical death and a prisoner-of-war longing to be home again in Russia. In these four stories, Stefan Zweig shows his gift for the acute analysis of emotional dilemmas. His four tragic and moving cameos of the human condition are played out against cosmopolitan and colonial backgrounds in the first half of the twentieth century.
“What did Zweig have that brought him the fanatical devotion of millions of readers, the admiration of Herman Hesse, the invitation to give the eulogy at the funeral of Sigmund Freud? To learn that, we would have to have a biography that illuminated all aspects of his work, that read all of his books, and that challenged, rather than accepted, the apparent modesty of his statements about his life and work.” – Benjamin Moser, Bookforum
 
“Amok, a 1922 novella (recently reissued in Pushkin Press’s Collected Stories, translated by Anthea Bell). . . is quintessentially Zweig, masterful in generating suspense, operatically predictable (the woman always dies in Act Four, so the man has a story to tell in Act Five), and drenched in the implicit mores of the day, which Zweig tweaked in his modest fashion by depicting a clean abortion as a better option than a coat hanger. . . . Amok is a compelling story: for its meticulous portrait of the doctor’s emotional process, its compression, and the almost identically sharp observations of gestures, movements, the charged silences in a conversation.” – Gary Indiana, Bookforum


"I can’t think of a writer who is more successful at depicting amour fou - what one critic describes as 'sex and madness breaking through the lacquered screen of upper-bourgeois society'- nowhere more grippingly than in Amok in which a doctor, a Conradesque loner, is tipped into "a sort of human rabies" by an unattainable colonial wife." – Julie Kavanagh, The Economist Intelligent Life

"To read Zweig is to be in the presence of a properly mature writer, for all that his characters are often in the grip of highly inappropriate desires. (...) These are unforgettable stories, beautifully translated. Anthea Bell is a first-rate translator; she brings out the humour as well as the anguish that make Zweig's work so sympathetically acute." – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

"Touching and delightful. Those adjectives are not meant as faint praise. Zweig may be especially appealing now because rather than being a progenitor of big ideas, he was a serious entertainer, and an ardent and careful observer of habits, foibles, passions and mistakes." A.O. Scott, The New York Times 
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear.In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York—a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel,Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press. View titles by Stefan Zweig

About

A doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty culminates in an almost lyrical death and a prisoner-of-war longing to be home again in Russia. In these four stories, Stefan Zweig shows his gift for the acute analysis of emotional dilemmas. His four tragic and moving cameos of the human condition are played out against cosmopolitan and colonial backgrounds in the first half of the twentieth century.

Reviews

“What did Zweig have that brought him the fanatical devotion of millions of readers, the admiration of Herman Hesse, the invitation to give the eulogy at the funeral of Sigmund Freud? To learn that, we would have to have a biography that illuminated all aspects of his work, that read all of his books, and that challenged, rather than accepted, the apparent modesty of his statements about his life and work.” – Benjamin Moser, Bookforum
 
“Amok, a 1922 novella (recently reissued in Pushkin Press’s Collected Stories, translated by Anthea Bell). . . is quintessentially Zweig, masterful in generating suspense, operatically predictable (the woman always dies in Act Four, so the man has a story to tell in Act Five), and drenched in the implicit mores of the day, which Zweig tweaked in his modest fashion by depicting a clean abortion as a better option than a coat hanger. . . . Amok is a compelling story: for its meticulous portrait of the doctor’s emotional process, its compression, and the almost identically sharp observations of gestures, movements, the charged silences in a conversation.” – Gary Indiana, Bookforum


"I can’t think of a writer who is more successful at depicting amour fou - what one critic describes as 'sex and madness breaking through the lacquered screen of upper-bourgeois society'- nowhere more grippingly than in Amok in which a doctor, a Conradesque loner, is tipped into "a sort of human rabies" by an unattainable colonial wife." – Julie Kavanagh, The Economist Intelligent Life

"To read Zweig is to be in the presence of a properly mature writer, for all that his characters are often in the grip of highly inappropriate desires. (...) These are unforgettable stories, beautifully translated. Anthea Bell is a first-rate translator; she brings out the humour as well as the anguish that make Zweig's work so sympathetically acute." – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

"Touching and delightful. Those adjectives are not meant as faint praise. Zweig may be especially appealing now because rather than being a progenitor of big ideas, he was a serious entertainer, and an ardent and careful observer of habits, foibles, passions and mistakes." A.O. Scott, The New York Times 

Author

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear.In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York—a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel,Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press. View titles by Stefan Zweig