Jona Oberski: A Childhood

Pushkin Press, two years into new ownership and going from strong to stronger, is one of the few publishers I buy books from on reputation alone (see also: NYRB Classics, CB Editions, Penguin Modern Classics). Their untouchably handsome Pushkin Collection titles, designed by Clare Skeats and David Pearson, are usually new translations of overlooked 20th century world fiction. This is a slight variation: a reissue of a book already translated: the first English edition was published thirty years ago. Fortunately, Pushkin’s eye has not dimmed: this tiny novel, which Alan Sillitoe called “the book of this damned century,” was worth reissuing.

A Childhood (Kinderjaren, 1978; tr. 1983 by Ralph Manheim) is a short book – on normal sized pages it would be below 100 pages; in the Pushkin Collection it stretches to 127 – and this will be a short review. What to say about it other than to admit that it approaches perfection? So engaged was I while reading it that I didn’t even mark any notable passages as I went, so this review will be light on quotes.

But there might be another reason why I didn’t. The key to the book’s success is its absolute submission to the viewpoint of its narrator, a boy who is seven years old at the book’s end. So the language is plain, unaffected, with not many memorable sentences or shiny turns of phrase. We are completely within the boy’s head, and we take from the events only what he takes. When the book opens with his mother saying, “Don’t be afraid. Everything’s all right. I’m right here,” we might suspect otherwise, but there is no authorial irony overlaid: the narrative is entirely unadulterated (pun intended) by grown-up insights. In the opening scenes, the boy is first in darkness and then has his eyes closed, and the trust he must put in his mother to guide him fairly represents the reader’s dependence his words.

This is a rare achievement and a delight, because my experience is that very few narratives do restrict themselves completely to their character’s viewpoint, and they lose plausibility and connection as a result. A third person narrative is typically told through one character’s eyes at a time, yet how often I find myself howling in horror when a narrator starts describing or contemplating things that no real person ever would in that situation. Often this is background detail or ‘helpful’ colour: a character reflecting on their job or home life in a way that nobody really would, except that it saves having to convey the information to the reader more subtly. Take this story by thriller writer Matthew Reilly, where a character looks out a tower block window in Manhattan and notes the buildings he can see, and then devolves into guidebook gabble with: “In the concrete jungle in between the river and the Empire State, the keen tourist would find Grand Central Station, fashionable Fifth Avenue, and on the banks of the river itself, the UN building.” That is an extreme example, but it’s remarkable how few writers really do control the viewpoint properly. William Golding is one: in The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and The Spire he gives the reader only what his characters might be thinking. It makes for harder work, but the benefits – involvement, plausibility, intensity and force of narrative – are multiple.

Oberski balances the information carefully. There are a few details which direct the reader on what might be happening: references to a country the family wants to travel to, a decoration the boy’s mother sews on his coat. Only later do we get specifics, as the information might reasonably have seeped into the boy’s consciousness. What we see is clear but concealed. In writing about it this way, I am withholding details artificially, and anyway it is not a surprising or unique setting, but I do think it worth reading cold, without much advance knowledge. Where the technique is most effective is when the boy is viewing adult emotions without experiencing them himself: the reader can feel them strongly, with the boy as a symptomless carrier, but without seeming to be manipulated. (The manipulation is there, but it feels as though the reader is doing some work along with the author, so it slips smoothly by.) And there is a powerful swell of direct emotion as the book ends, and a pleasingly ambiguous future is suggested. We are left only with a beautifully judged epigraph facing the final page, which seems to bolster the idea, never far off, that this was as much memoir as novel.

For my foster parents
who had quite a time
with me.

A word in conclusion about the cover image. The delicate illustration is by Eleanor Crow, and is based on the cover image for the Dutch edition. However it seems very likely that the original drawing was based on this photograph of Franz Kafka at four years old (as pointed out by Steve Mitchelmore, when I tweeted the cover). An odd connection: anyone with any understanding of this should make free in the comments section below.

Stefan Zweig: Amok and other stories

Hard to believe that it’s almost a year since I last read a Stefan Zweig. He’s one of those writers, like Richard Yates, who was invisible for years and is suddenly – if you’re looking for him – everywhere. The admirable and unpredictable Pushkin Press are reissuing his stories in English, with two volumes this year already (Journey into the Past, and Wondrak and other stories). That made me realise that it’s about time I read an earlier volume of his I’d bought, Amok and other stories. This edition was published in 2007, translated by Anthea Bell, but the stories within date from throughout Zweig’s career (including his busy posthumous period).

Amok (1922) was one of Zweig’s best-known novellas in his lifetime. At the time of publication, the word amok was not in common use, and was a term used specifically in Malaysian culture, when ‘running amok’ was thought to be a sudden rage or passion induced by drugs or other intoxication. Typically it would involve a killing spree and other consequences, which can’t be revealed without spoiling the story. Here, however, there is no killing spree but a western doctor working in the Dutch East Indies, torn between duty and desire and driven mad – sent amok – by his feelings. His story is told, as Zweig so often does, through the framing device of another’s account: here, a man who meets the doctor on board ship.

“Odd psychological states have a positively disquieting power over me,” says our narrator, and he’s come to the right place. The doctor tells of how he was visited in the colony by a woman, who requests something of him. Her coolness and hauteur lead the doctor to become – almost literally – possessed by what appears to be a combination of power and lust, leading him to refuse the woman’s request but to long for her in pretty frank terms:

From that moment on, I felt I could see her naked body through her dress … from that moment on I lived for nothing but the idea of taking her, forcing a groan from her hard lips, feeling this cold, arrogant woman a prey to desire like anyone else. […] it wasn’t desire, the rutting instinct, nothing sexual, I swear it wasn’t, I can vouch for it … just a wish to break her pride, dominate her as a man.

The woman disappears and he runs amok, helpfully defining the term as “a sort of human rabies, an attack of murderous, pointless monomania” – and you can see why Zweig, with his love of characters in heightened states of emotion, was attracted to the concept.

It can’t end well, for the doctor or the protagonist in the other three stories here, ‘The Star above the Forest’, ‘Leporella’ and ‘Incident at Lake Geneva’. In each one, Zweig shows someone overcome by irrational passion or obsession, and seems less interested in showing how they got there (it’s irrational, after all) than in giving us a meticulous account of how it leads to their downfall. “You don’t run amok for long with impunity, you’re bound to be struck down in the end, and I hope it will soon all be over for me.”

There are moments of imaginative distinction and cruel brilliance here. ‘The Star above the Forest’ twists the old cliché about distanced lovers watching the same stars above them, and brings together lover and beloved in a grotesque ending. (“…the rails beneath his head were already beginning to vibrate and sing faintly”). ‘Leporella’ shows an ugly household servant become infatuated with her master, and the only possible end of that. ‘Incident on Lake Geneva’, a small miracle, creates a tragedy from the despair of a Russian prisoner of war learning, in 1918, that his homeland has changed irretrievably.

These four stories, from ten to seventy pages, show Zweig at his best. Such is the answering hunger they evoke, that the reader can only feel like a luckier version of one of Zweig’s protagonists: a story barely known a moment ago becomes a sudden obsession, dragging one through in a passion of discovery right to the bitter end.

Marcel Aymé: Beautiful Image

The only problem I have with the reliable Pushkin Press is that all their books seem so appealing that I am foxed by choice and usually end up reading none of them, or else playing safe with another Stefan Zweig. When I say ‘appealing’ I mean not only the subject – 20th-century European fiction, usually novella length – but (predictably) the appearance. Many of their books are produced in what they call ‘Jewel’ format: squarish small paperbacks with thick matt covers, with the tactile ribbed texturing of laid paper, which I’ve attempted to show below.

Beautiful Image (La Belle Image) by Marcel Aymé was published in 1941 and is now translated into English for the first time. It’s what a Hollywood pitcher would call a high concept story, the premise both archetypal and novel: what happens when a man suddenly discovers that his face has changed? The results could be either comical or (for once, genuinely) Kafkaesque. Raoul Cérusier discovers his problem – and opportunity – when his identity photographs are rejected by a bureaucratic office. “I give you my word that these are photographs of me. It’s incomprehensible. You have seen them wrong. You must have seen them wrong.”

Even when he suspects the truth, he doesn’t want to believe it – and who can blame him? He knows that when he tells other people, it will be no more than a curiosity of minor amusement to them.

Anybody, I assured myself, could dig up “something very strange which he cannot explain” from the depths of his memory. There’s nothing more ordinary. At the time of the experience, it was bizarre, even frightening, but retold, it becomes nothing at all. In reality, nothing had actually happened.

This is a hint that Cérusier’s narrative may not be reliable, but his reactions are real. Initial self-disgust at the metamorphosis – “a landslide which swept away all my defences” – gradually becomes a sense of endangered opportunity. We learn that he may not be an entirely trustworthy person, and that he has recently ended an affair with his young assistant at work, Lucienne. We gain a tantalising glimpse of a pleasingly perverse relationship of power, of how Lucienne “likes to take revenge” for her abandonment:

For instance, when we’re working at my desk facing each other, she might calmly lay down her pen or document, take my face in her large, hot hands and gaze ardently into my eyes while, silently, she blushes all over, like a man. Overwhelmed, holding my breath, I await her orders. I even hope for them. She knows it, but if I risk making the least gesture, she drops me with a kind smile and returns to her work. I always feel a terrible disappointment, which fades as soon as I’m alone, and even becomes a point of satisfaction when I have my wife beside me.

With other hints at his level of selfishness, it comes as no surprise that Cérusier quickly begins to adapt to his change of face and to change his fate accordingly. “I shall have to resign myself to adopting a slightly different kind of morality, something more akin to that of a fare-dodger.” That is, he decides to move into the flat above his family and to set about seducing his wife. ‘A slightly different kind of morality’ just about sums that up, though we are quickly reminded that anyone who eavesdrops – whether on a conversation, or an another life – never heard anything good about himself. Nonetheless, seduction is made easier by Cérusier’s new face being rather better-looking than the old one, and he also finds it attracts others, which he reflects

might become a source of trouble. The discipline I used to impose on myself no longer applied. … The poor man may well boast of his virtue in the face of the temptations to which rich people succumb. In truth, he has no idea what it is to be tempted to misuse one’s wealth.

Set against these opportunities is the inevitable sense of loneliness which befalls a man who can no longer be known to anyone, who to all intents has fallen to earth from a clear blue sky. “The universe that used to rotate around me is gone. … There was nothing left of Raoul Cérusier but my belief in his existence.” Cérusier confides in his uncle, which leads to some broad comedy of car engines, pigs, and mistaken names. More significantly, Aymé explores how deeply even our closest relationships depend on appearances, as well as how we “won’t accept certainties that aren’t acknowledged elsewhere.”

Translator Sophie Lewis, whose rendering is all that one could wish for (that is, I never felt I was reading a translation), provides an afterword which gives useful background to Aymé and his work, as well as some insights into the themes. So, having braved a random Pushkin, I’m glad to have benefited from a book every bit as interesting, readable and provocative as, well, as Stefan Zweig. The drawback is that it confirms my original suspicion that everything Pushkin publishes is worth reading, and paralyses me into inactivity once more. Until next time.

Stefan Zweig: Fantastic Night and other stories

When usually the prospect of reading a complete book of stories by the same author fills me with apathy, I’m not sure why I continue to be attracted to the collections of Stefan Zweig, published in the UK by Pushkin Press. This volume includes two stories I’ve already read, ‘The Invisible Collection’ and ‘Buchmendel’: frankly, to have already got two-fifths of a book under my belt before I’d even begun must have been a factor.

An image like the one on the cover appears in the third story, ‘The Fowler Snared’.

From time to time came a meteor, like one of these stars loosened from the firmament and plunging athwart the night sky; downwards into the dark, into the valleys, on to the hills, or into the distant water, driven by a blind force as our lives are driven into the abysses of unknown destinies.

‘Lives … driven into the abysses of unknown destinies’ are a feature of many of Zweig’s stories, though really it’s not so much the destiny which interests him – often the tale will end just as the life is opening up to new possibilities, and the reader must imagine those for himself – as the ‘blind force’ which drives them. But if this suggests a fatalism in his characters, that would not be quite true.

In the title story ‘Fantastic Night’ (1922) – the longest in the collection at 54 pages – the central character, typically for Zweig, is at one remove from us, his story told through the framing device of the narrator being given a bundle of papers which contain the text. Again typically for Zweig, we are then given a detailed and emotive account of the man’s spiritual awakening, which “has become the pivot on which my whole existence turns.” Before this ‘fantastic night’ he was a successful but empty man of 36 with independent income and no real concerns.

I did not lack for success with women, and here too, with the secret collector’s urge which in a way indicates a lack of real involvement, I chalked up many memorable and precious hours of varied experience. In this field I gradually moved from being a mere sensualist to the status of a knowledgeable connoisseur. … But nothing stirred, I felt as if I were made of glass, with the world outside shining through me and never lingering within…

What changes his life is a day at the races, where a minor lapse of morality gives vent to such feelings of vigour and life when he cheats to win that “I felt myself, desiccated as I was, suddenly flowering again.” This leads to “the pull of criminality” and later to “the frenzied enchantment of gambling for the second time in twelve hours, but this time for the highest of stakes, for my whole comfortable existence, even my life.” Zweig takes his time over this development, and it’s tempting to yell Get on with it! as he gives us a moment-by-moment account of our man’s growth. Yet his triumph in ‘Fantastic Night’ is twofold. First, to reach one of his usual fine epiphanies at the end of the story and make us realise it could not have been told any more briefly without losing its cumulative power; and second, to seemingly leave the story open-ended until we return to the framing introduction and discover we already know the character’s fate from the outset as surely and as subtly as we do with Mrs Richard F Schiller’s in Lolita, and that the end loops back to the beginning in a highly satisfying way.

Elsewhere I read that the second story in this volume, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ (1922), was one of Zweig’s finest moments. I don’t know about that, but it does have one remarkable quality in a story – yet again – of constantly heightened emotion and passionate expression, which is to make the most interesting character the one who never speaks, to whom the story is addressed. This is a writer of Zweig’s age and nationality, who receives a letter from a woman who turns out to have adored him all her life.

Nothing can equal the unnoticed love of a child. It is hopeless and subservient; it is patient and passionate; it is something which the covetous love of a grown woman, the love that is unconsciously exacting, can never be.

There are dramatic developments, but all along the most interesting question from the reader’s point of view is: how is the writer – who has chosen to share this letter with us – feeling about it? Wondering whether we will ever find out is the greatest pleasure of all.

This volume is essential for any Zweig fan, or indeed any admirer of strongly driven stories of unrequited love and metaphysical frenzy – which almost goes without saying as I had already recommended the last two stories here (‘The Invisible Collection’ and ‘Buchmendel’) in their stand-alone edition. The final story here that was new to me is the ten-page short ‘The Fowler Snared,’ where Zweig plays with the notion of fiction and the responsibility of the author to his characters. One character has no interest in such things:

The fancies of fiction… do they not fade after a time, do they not perish in twenty, fifty or a hundred years?

Yes they do, but this one – first published in 1906 – looks like surviving a little longer yet.

Stefan Zweig: Confusion

For keen readers staying away from home overnight – indeed, for anyone with time to kill and a standard sized pocket – I recommend the Pushkin Press editions of the stories of Stefan Zweig. We’ve been here before, of course, twice in fact, but I always seem to have another of these handsome volumes squirreled away, and another trip where they make early waking in a strange bed a pleasure (don’t make up your own jokes).

Last weekend I read Confusion, first published in 1927, which at 140 pages is one of Zweig’s longer stories: perhaps even a novella. It lacks the framing device of some of his other tales – the narrator here is also the central character – but contains in full the qualities we expect of him: an urgency in the reader’s mind to read on, and a heightened emotional state more or less throughout.

This latter is odd: in other hands, in a modern story, it might seem parodic or over-the-top, but we never doubt the sincerity and angst of Zweig’s people. This one is a university professor looking back on his career, and in particular his dealings with another professor who inspired him as a young student. He is a vital youth, discovering his independence, “every cell in my being … crying out for sudden expansion” and finding the perfect vehicle for this in Berlin, “that heated giantess, that restless city radiating power.” He passes the time indulging himself:

I would take back to my lodgings now a flaxen-haired milky-skinned servant girl from Mecklenburg, heated by the dancing, before she went home from her day off, now a timid, nervous little Jewish girl from Posen who sold stockings in Tietz’s – most of them easy pickings, to be had for the taking and passed on quickly to my friends.

It doesn’t hurt that he’s “a strikingly good-looking young man. Tall, slim, the bronzed hue of the sea coast still fresh on my cheeks, my every movement athletically supple,” but soon he discovers passion not of the body but of the mind, when he attends a tutorial by a literature professor. It is a revelation to our hero as he listens to a discussion on Elizabethan England and its “true bold leap into infinity” as an age comes into its own through the crucible of art, Shakespeare being “merely the strongest manifestation, the psychic message of a whole generation, expressing, through the senses, a time turned passionately enthusiastic.”

I had never before known language as ecstasy, the passion of discourse as an elemental act, and the unexpected shock of it drew me closer.

It draws him closer in particular to the professor, and he ends up sharing accommodation with him and his wife. What follows cannot be detailed any further for risk of landing in a swamp of spoilers, though the fact that our narrator seems to be returning to his old ways when he acknowledges the “slender boyish figure” of the professor’s wife in her swimsuit, should be warning enough. Alternatively, if you read the gnomic and superfluous afterword to the story by Joel Rosenthal (who also provided the cover illustration) then the essence of the game will be given away instantly. Be warned.

What Confusion gives us is a remarkably sympathetic portrait for the times of a particular social heresy – filled with his reliably high-octane emotion and cataclysmic sense of despair. The subject matter, as a taboo, has so faded for us that it would hardly make the story worth writing today. But if Zweig was still alive and wanted to write it again, I’d probably let him away with it.

Arthur Schnitzler: Dying

Where have I heard that name before? Ah yes: Arthur Schnitzler was the author of Traumnovelle (Dream Story), which was adapted into Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, in 1999. I got a free copy of the book with the Guardian, and never bothered reading it. So I think we can safely say I’m approaching Dying without any unnecessary mental clutter such as, say, knowledge or understanding.

And here’s the thing: how do you counter the natural reaction to the idea of reading a 19th century German novella about the inevitability of death, which is something like Do you mind if I don’t? How to counter it is simple: bring it out in an irresistible little edition by Pushkin Press, the people who brought us Stefan Zweig. Their pocket size, elegant cover design and tactile paper make them, for me, literally unputdownable, even before we consider the content.

No worries there anyway. Dying (1895) has that sensibility – European, and of the period, I suppose – of emotional directness which is so refreshing to us stiff-lipped British. Felix has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and has been given a year to live. His lover, Marie, reacts with disarming – hysterical – loyalty: “I want to die with you.”

He smiled. “That’s childish. I’m not so small-minded as you think me. And I have no right at all to take you with me.”

“I can’t live without you.”

“But think how long you lived without me before! I was already doomed when I met you a year ago. I didn’t know it, but even then I had a presentiment.”

“You don’t know now.”

“Yes, I do. That’s why I want you to have your freedom, beginning today.” She clung all the closer. “Take it, take it,” he said. She did not reply, but looked up at him as if she didn’t understand.

She cried out, “I’ve lived with you, I’ll die with you.”

Of course, as Felix moves toward the inevitable, Marie finds herself rather more attached to life than she anticipated. The couple move from place to place for rest cures and convalescence, and when she leaves Felix’s side for an hour or two, she finds “unutterable contentment flow through her.” So she battles her instincts, just as Felix battles despair and, even worse, hope. He is sometimes insouciant, other times Larkinesque (“Being brave / Lets no-one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood”) in his approach to the matter:

I’ll tell you straight out, people falsify the psychology of dying, because all the great figures of world history of whose deaths we know anything felt duty-bound to put on an act for posterity. … I too feel in duty bound to pretend, whereas in reality I’m prey to a boundless, raging fear of a kind that healthy people can’t imagine. They’re all afraid, and that includes the heroes and the philosophers, only they make the best play-actors.

As such Dying presents us with a frank and bracing meditation on the subject. How often we hear, in the news or anecdotally, of someone “being given” (as though it were a gift) so many months to live, but rarely do we stop to consider the effect this has on them and their loved ones, and how it irrevocably alters those remaining months. Dying makes us wonder, and then gives us at least one answer. At 120 pages, it’s an invigorating palate cleanser between longer books, the introspective story as addictive as it is inevitable. Now where’s that copy of Dream Story?

Stefan Zweig: Twilight / Moonbeam Alley

In the past week I have begun, and failed to click with, four different books. I began to think I was losing my mind. So I needed something short, something addictive, something beautifully written, and ideally also something about someone else losing their mind to make me feel better. I found them all in one hundred pages in Stefan Zweig’s Twilight/Moonbeam Alley.

Twilight (first published 1910) is one of the finest stories I have ever read. (The second story Moonbeam Alley is enjoyable but not a patch on Twilight, so I will restrict myself to talking about the main feature.) Oddly, I’d flicked through this volume when browsing my Zweigs and had been put off by the opening lines of the blurb: ‘Twilight, based on the real life of Madame de Prie…’ – I got no further before silently thinking Boring! Who wants to read a fictionalised account of the life of an 18th century French aristocrat? Well, shame on me.

Madame de Prie is a favourite of the King at the Palace of Versailles, with almost no qualities whatsoever, or at least no positive ones – she is vain, shallow, self-centred and a mistress of self-deception. So long has she been lying to herself and to others for her own amusement (“Deception, the delight of her life, opened up her heart again”) that she no longer knows what is important to her.

When she falls from favour, and is exiled to a country estate, she is lost but confident:

Her exile couldn’t last for more than a few days, until tempers had calmed down, and then her friends would make sure she was recalled. In her mind, she was already looking forward to her revenge, and soothed her anger with that idea.

Writing a letter to stay in touch with her true – that is, her truly false – friends back at Versailles, she “hoped not to stay in the country long, she said, although she liked it here very well. She didn’t even notice that she was lying to him.” She tries to find ways to amuse herself in her new life, including her dealings with a local peasant:

It made her feel quite cheerful. For the first time she felt the old relish, mingled with slight contempt, of seeing a human being powerless before her. It revived the desire to toy with others which had become a necessity of life to her during her years of power.

Zweig skewers Madame de Prie until she is pinned and wriggling on the wall, her terrible behaviour and turmoil awful to read about but impossible to tear yourself away from. To say any more would spoil it, but I could quote dozens more extracts. His bleak and ironic telling finds time for cool wit even in the darkness of the last pages, when he offers us his usual summation of the theme. It’s a testament to Zweig’s ability that this ‘moral of the tale’ ending does not seem superfluous, but rather tops the whole thing off beautifully. Why Zweig isn’t spoken of in the same revered tones as Chekhov is a mystery.

Stefan Zweig: The Invisible Collection / Buchmendel

As promised previously, I have finally picked up some of Stefan Zweig’s stories as published by Pushkin Press in their handsome little squarish editions, and the first of these was The Invisible Collection / Buchmendel.

This slim volume comprises two stories, 26 pages and 56 pages respectively, and you might think this is not very good value at the price of a normal paperback. You might be right – there is another volume of Zweig pairs, Twilight / Moonbeam Alley, not much longer. Would it have killed Pushkin to bundle them together in one 200-page book? On the other hand, they are bringing us great fiction, and these beautifully stitched and printed volumes can’t be cheap to make.

Anyway. The Invisible Collection, first published in 1926, has the usual Zweig framing device of a man telling us a story about a story told to him by another man. This time it’s a dealer in rare books and prints in Germany, during its period of hyperinflation in the 1920s, when goods rose in price daily and most money literally wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. The book dealer decides to look up some old buyers, to see if they are willing to sell back their purchases in these straitened times. What he discovers with one old man shocks him, and provides Zweig not only with the opportunity to fit a story within the story, but to produce a satisfying and accessible tale reflecting (as he points out) Goethe’s maxim that “Collectors are happy creatures.” It put me a little in mind of Raymond Carver’s story ‘Cathedral,’ or one of Roald Dahl’s adult stories without the glib desire for a twist.

Buchmendel, dating from 1929, introduces us to the story of Mendel, an unassuming young man who has

a titanic memory, wherein, behind a dirty and undistinguished-looking forehead, was indelibly recorded a picture of the title page of every book that had been printed. No matter whether it had issued from the press yesterday or hundreds of years ago, he knew its place of publication, its author’s name, and its price. From his mind, as if from the printed page, he could read off the contents, could reproduce the illustrations; could visualise, not only what he had actually held in his hands, but also what he had glanced at in a bookseller’s window; could see it with the same vividness as an artist sees the creations of fancy which he has not yet reproduced upon canvas.

This takes us into a story with some similarities to Zweig’s Chess / The Royal Game, and it’s a feature of these short stories (the pages are small as well as few) that I can’t really say any more without spoiling part of the fun. And reading Zweig is fun. He reminds us in Buchmendel that “one only makes books in order to keep in touch with one’s fellows after one has ceased to breathe, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives – transitoriness and oblivion.” Thanks to Pushkin Press, Zweig’s mission is accomplished.