Stefan Zweig - 'The World of Yesterday'

No. But i must! I read his 'The Post Office Girl' a couple of weeks ago. Wonderful book. He wrote it and never published it for some reason--not for lack of quality, though.

i just bought this!

really looking forward to it. i love twilight-of-vienna stuff. have you read "last waltz in vienna" by george clare?

i love twilight-of-vienna stuff

Seconded! Zweig, Schnitzler, Roth, etc. Beautiful writers.

ya. though i wasnt as crazy about the radetzky march as i thought i'd be!

has anyone here read those two frederic morton vienna books, "a nervous splendor" and "thunder at twilight"?

No, but now I've looked them up I'm going to!

you should, & report back

mr. white how are you digging WoY?

btw i really recommend last waltz in vienna, beautiful book and really not as known as it should be.

I had a lovely weekend and hence read neither the Zweig nor the Baring I brought with me, but so far, it's quite lovely. I rather enjoyed 'The Radetzky March', enough to re-read it in English a few years ago after first 'discovering' him in French.

Schnitzler is def. on my list as is Clare, now (thanks slocki). I loved 'A Nervous Splendor' but I haven't read 'Thunder at Twilight'. I'll look it up.

Also, check out Clive James's Cultural Amnesia. It can feel a little like a Cold-War anti-commie screed at times and some of his bravado is just plain dumb, but he really loves him some pre-war Viennese intellectuals.

yes!

i really enjoyed cultural amnesia! introduced to a handful of new things like nadezhda mandelstam.

hope you like the clare book... here's his description of new year's 1937, which sort of concludes the "before the storm" part of the book:

"We were in the study—Father, Mother and I. Father and I played a few games of chess, we talked, listened to the radio cabaret, whiled away the time till midnight. The saw-blade clock, balanced on the head of the baroque clown figurine, showed that midnight was only a few minutes away. Father opened the window to Nussdorferstrasse. We stood by it and waited for the sound of Vienna’s many church bells, ringing out the Old and ringing in the New. When their booms and chimes broke the stillness of the night, we raised our glasses, drank to each other and kissed."

also, DEFINITELY read thunder at twilight. it's basically a nervous splendour 25 years later. some fascinating echoes.

Just got T at T today and will commence after W of Y. Zweig's description of living in Paris as a young man brought a wee tear to my eyes this morning on the bus.

OK, have ordered A Nervous Splendour.

You'll love it. Good read.

ya!

Update: 'TWoY' highly readable, poignant, and thought-provoking.

yay!

Was in Sydney over the last few days, hitting the bookshops: found an Arthur Scnitzler novel from 1908 I'd never heard of, "The Road into the Open". From the blurb:

"A finely drawn portrayal of the disintegration of Austrian liberal society under the impact of nationalism and anti-semitism, The Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie, 1908) is a remarkable novel by a major Austrian writer of the early twentieth century. Set in fin-de-siècle Austria—the cafés, salons, and musical concerts frequented by the Viennese elite—Schnitzler's perceptive exploration of the creative process and the private lives and public aspirations of urban Jewish intellectuals ranks with the highest achievements of Karl Kraus and Robert Musil.

The novel's central character, Baron Georg von Wergenthin, is a handsome young composer whose troubled relations with women, musical collaborators, and representatives of the old social order make Schnitzler's book a revealing investigation of individual psychology and social allegory. In his comprehensive introduction, Russell Berman situates the book within the literary and political history of Central Europe and analyzes its relation to psychoanalysis, Marxism, musical aesthetics, and the legacy of European modernism."

Sounds like the sort of thing people hereabouts would like. It's Uni of California Press.

James, let us know what you think of it when you're finished.

Man, 'Thunder at Twilight' was a fun read.

Also, review of Franziska by Ernst Weiss in this weeks Guardian looks promising: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2284286,00.html

how's the zweig going

Are you asking me? 'World of Yesterday' was great. A bit grim, but a good read.

yes!

have you read his "beware of pity"? great, devastating novel.

Very, very great novel!

I read it last fall. Excellent book.

i found both of the novellas i read by him (Chess or The Royal Game and Confusion of Feelings) good but frustrating. i found that they relied too much on the narrator telling me what was happening rather than actually showing it happening, if that makes any sense? a lot of long descriptions of conversations rather than actual dialogue etc.

i'm interested in Beware of Pity, for the title alone, and in this autobiography. a writer's life that ends in double suicide has to be an interesting one psychologically.

also, i found that both of those books played out exactly as i had anticipated they would almost from the first chapter. although a novel about homosexual confusion obviously reads very differently now than it would have in the 1927.

sorry to go on! but Confusion of Feelings particularly made me more interested in Zweig himself than in the characters in the book.

jed, read 'TWoY'.

OK, I saw a copy of The Post Office Girl yesterday and went ahead and bought it because of this thread. Not that I'm going to actually read it, but I just thought I'd tell you anyway.

I don't have anything to add really, but I'm glad that other people have read "TWoY". I saw the book mentioned somewhere a long time ago and then a year ago saw an ancient copy at my college library. In my mind I guess I tend to gloss over what a shattering experience the First World War was for Europeans, and so it was great to have someone talking about the periods both before and after who was so much a part of it.

i just started this tonight! in prague!

man i'm loving this... almost done. the little character sketches are amazing. loved the bit on herzl.

Can't believe I still don't have this!

# Stefan Zweig - 'The World of Yesterday' [Started by Michael White, last updated Yesterday] 3 new answers

hmmm

i like how this book is fairly impersonal as far as memoirs go; meant more to reflect the times and places zweig lived through. still, it was startling to realize that both of the women he was married to got one brief passing reference each.

Without starting a thread - Joseph Roth: what would you recommend? I know there are one or two above, but anymore is there anymore to look out for since this thread started

'Legend of the Holy Drinker' is a strange and wonderful book that takes about 30 minutes to read. For something more substantial, good starting points are 'Hotel Savoy', 'Rebellion', 'Confession of a Murderer', and maybe 'A String of Pearls'/'Story of thr 1002nd Night'.

Thanks!

just read Zweig's bio of Balzac...it was a good quick read!

This got a demolition job in the LRB:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n02/michael-hofmann/vermicular-dither

I like Hofmann's reviews for this paper, but it seems to come down to (in no partic order of importance):

- He sold a LOT of books

- Those were made into many films, most of which are American

- The Viennese lit scene disliked his writing (including Joseph Roth, whom he has extensively translated)

- He wrote a lot, easily, without a moment to spare on revision

But I kind of agree with the main bit on the writing.

One appreciates the ease, the fluency, perhaps most of all the fearlessness of the writing, but I fail to see the least dash or economy or precision (let alone beauty) in this clubbing and relentless and unaware deployment of parts of speech that stands in for a style, and is everywhere the same. Zweig is both an absolutely natural and an absolutely dreadful writer; the one quality of course does not preclude the other.

Otoh, some of this can also apply to Joseph Roth at times? Whereas Arthur Schnitzler is (from just one novella) a really fascinating writer (but in the writing as well as content).

As for Zweig I've read 2-3 novellas with diminishing returns, although I quite liked parts of Beware of Pity.

I have to say I have a big respect for Hofmann (he's translated so many books which I adore), but he's wrong here. Zweig is GREAT.

This book owns.Three quarters through, and some of what I enjoy:

* The sleepy, idyllic and yet still critical depiction of the conservative, cozy sturdyness of 19th century life.

* The ridiculous amounts of walk-ins with other famous people, making it feel almost like a "League Of Extraorindary Gentlemen" but for, you know, REAL LIFE- Freud, Herzl, James Ensor, Rodin, Rilke, Yeats, Joyce, all happily strolling through the narrative like it ain't no thang.

* As M White noted, the evocation of Paris as a sort of utopia of acceptance and hedonism, filled with drink, food, good company, devoid of racism, intolerance, hate, "where anybody could live as bohemian or as bourgeois lifestyle as they wished to".

* How much he seems on the right side of history w/r/t gender relations.

* How calmly and systematically he seemed to have taken his time before plunging into his work and some sort of Adult LIfe in general.

* And then, of course, the tragedy of WWI, cliques of friends separated by the folly of their governments, a dreamland destroyed in a minute, the image of german and russian soldiers breaking bread though they do not speak the same language, using fingers to enquire how old the kid in the pitcures the soldier is showing is, that letter from Rollande, "je ne quitterais jamais mes amis". I was reading it on a plane and seriously tearing up. Also that part about Zurich as the refuge of pacifists, socialists and intelectuals of all stripes during WWI, and thus also rotten with spies and double agents trying to discover allegiances. If no one's written a cracking good spy novel about this period they definitley should!

i like how this book is fairly impersonal as far as memoirs go; meant more to reflect the times and places zweig lived through. still, it was startling to realize that both of the women he was married to got one brief passing reference each.

Yeaj, this is urgent and key - he goes on about wanting to evoke the lifetime of a generation, not himself particuarly. Which almost makes it weird when he actually mentions his own plays, poetry, etc.