The Post-Office Girl (New York Review Books Classics)
Stefan Zweig
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1590172620
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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."
The post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train ride, Christine finds herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege that she had never imagined.
But Christine’s aunt drops her as abruptly as she picked her up, and soon the young woman is back at the provincial post office, consumed with disappointment and bitterness. Then she meets Ferdinand, a wounded but eloquent war veteran who is able to give voice to the disaffection of his generation. Christine’s and Ferdinand’s lives spiral downward, before Ferdinand comes up with a plan which will be either their salvation or their doom.
Never before published in English, this extraordinary book is an unexpected and haunting foray into noir fiction by one of the masters of the psychological novel.
and that’s it: still disheveled, her cheeks pink from the wind, she heads straight for one of the tables (she knows everyone now) to report on what she’s been doing. She always has something to report, she’s always just experienced something, it was always terrific, wonderful, indescribable, everything fills her with ardent enthusiasm; even a perfect stranger feels that here is a person full to bursting who can endure her excess of gratitude only by passing it along to someone else. She can’t see
and if anybody from that noisy bunch sits at my table I’m going to start smashing things.” Claire doesn’t argue—that can’t help when blue veins are pulsing on his brow—but what’s really annoying is that she has to admit he’s right. She herself was the one who pushed Christine into the social whirl to start with, and it was fun to see how smartly and gracefully the girl modeled the outfits. From her own youth she still has a confused memory of how delightful it was that first time when she dressed
cheerfully chatters away, turned toward him gratefully, but the old man is only half listening. A sudden boldness has come over him. He’s considering how he might subtly court her in what might be the last hour. They have tea at Schuls-Tarasp. Then, on a bench on the promenade, he begins, carefully and indirectly. He has two nieces, he says—about Christine’s age—in Oxford. If she wanted to come to England, she could stay there; he’d be delighted to have her, and if his set, an old man’s society
thinks. Don’t get mixed up in it. She’s not in her right mind, she doesn’t know what she’s saying. “Yes, yes, dear, of course,” he says, stroking her hair, “I understand … We’ll talk it all over inside, not here, you can’t stay here any longer … You might catch cold … in that thin dress without a coat … Come along, we’ll go in and sit in the lounge …” He carefully removes his arm. “Come on now, dear.” Christine stops sobbing and stares at him. She hasn’t heard or understood a word, but her body
brand-spanking-new thousand-crown notes that they turned out so brilliantly during the war. So now she has them hidden in her strongbox under the bed and swears they’ll be worth something again someday. They started out as twenty or twenty-five hectares and a beautiful stone house and some fine old heirloom furniture and forty or fifty years of work, didn’t they, so they couldn’t just stay nothing forever. The poor dear is seventy-five and doesn’t understand much anymore. She just goes on