Something that goes back a quarter of a century Have you time? And it wouldn’t bore you, would it?” “Incidentally,” a character in his novel Beware of Pity (1939) says to Stefan Zweig at a party, “I wouldn’t mind telling you the whole story straight out here and now. Zweig’s writings often feature him as a sort of literary detective: the famous, wealthy, cosmopolitan author Stefan Zweig, who pops into his own text and is approached by an irresistible narrative. He was a novella expert who called the form “my beloved but unfortunate format, too long for a newspaper or magazine, too short for a book.” Zweig also made fantastic use of narrative metalepsis - in other words, the intrusion of the narrator into the world of the story. Zweig faded from the American eye over the years until a sequence of reissues by multiple presses sparked new critical interest in his work. The manner of Stefan Zweig’s death and his position as an idealistic prelapsarian thinker perhaps muted the reception that the novella deserved Zweig, who was Jewish, never wrote about Hitler, and his suicide was related to despair over the loss of his homeland. Also in 1942, that same writer and his wife committed suicide in Brazil. IN 1942, A WORLD-RENOWNED Austrian writer in exile wrote a strange novella.
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