It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

I haven't taken part so far this year, so I've included in my 'recently read' books the ones I've read over the past couple of weeks. I'll try and write up some longer reviews or thoughts on some of these if I can soon.

Recently read:

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

I found this a quite magical, wonderful read. I felt immersed in the world created in the novel and the characters were really memorable. One to treasure, it took me away from my troubles and I really enjoyed reading it. I'd heard so much about this novel and I think maybe I worried if I'd love it or not myself, and I'm so glad I've read it now. The cover has to be one of the most beautiful around, too. 

 

Chess by Stefan Zweig (translated by Anthea Bell)

This was a superb little read, another that I ought to have read ages ago that has been languishing on my tbr pile, it's only a short work of about eighty pages, and I thought it was a fascinating tale, brilliantly told. I loved The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig - link to my review, as well as a couple of other works by him (Journey into the Past and Fear - reviews linked); this one is equally impressive. It was also great to read something in translation after not having done so for a while. 

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie 

I've been aiming to try and read some Agatha Christie novels for a while, at least the idea has been in my mind to get round to it, and I've finally made a start, with this, the first of her Poirot novels. It was a really good read and I look forward to reading more soon.

Reading now:

The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker

This was a lovely gift to me from a very kind and thoughtful book loving friend last year (who also gave me Chess, above) and I am so glad to be reading it now, I am about a quarter of the way through so far, it's quite a long one, and it is captivating and magical, I will savour reading more of it this coming week. 

Plumdog by Emma Chichester Clark

This is a graphic novel I bought at the weekend, it is beautifully illustrated and is an absolutely wonderful thing for dog lovers, just a delight to read and to look at!

Reading next:

I'm not certain what I will read next, I want to try and read this one very soon though as it has been on my tbr pile too long, so it may well be my next book.

Precious Thing by Colette McBeth

Did you read any of these/do they grab your interest?

What are you reading? 

I hope you have a great week of wonderful reading!

Fear - Stefan Zweig

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

'...her fear was waiting, impatient to take her in its grasp...'

This novella of less than a hundred pages was written almost a century ago by Stefan Zweig yet the themes of love and affairs, the search for excitement and passion, the guilt and the fear of discovery of infidelities are eternal ones that are just as relevant today. As the narrative commences, we meet Irene Wagner as she leaves the home of her lover, a young pianist, to return to her easy, comfortable bourgeois life, home and family. However, as she endeavours to overcome the fear that hits her upon leaving his arms, she is horrified to encounter his former mistress, who proceeds to blackmail her.

Zweig makes such accurate observations about human behaviour and relationships, and in particular here, such striking insights into a woman’s thoughts and emotions. It’s a beautifully written, intelligent and deeply insightful study of a woman seeking something beyond her bourgeois married life, and this English translation is excellent and a pleasure to read. I'm so glad that Zweig's works are available to a wider audience now. 

Published by Pushkin Press

originally reviewed for newbooks magazine

Journey into the Past - Stefan Zweig

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

‘Ah, the dark, endless years between then and now, a grey sea between shore and shore, between heart and heart!’

This novella by Stefan Zweig is so beautifully written and even in a short work such as this, there were so many sentences and passages I found myself marking to return to and enjoy again.

The story is of a man born into poverty, working for little money as a private tutor, who takes up a position offered to him by a famous industrialist which enables him to raise up from his humble beginnings, and whilst employed he meets and falls deeply in love with the wife of his employer. He is given a great career opportunity, which involves relocating overseas for two years, to Mexico. Despite his love, he goes, and the two keep in touch by letter, focused on meeting once again once the two years have passed. However, the onset of World War I then serves to keep the two separate for many years longer.

Eventually they meet again, and the novella begins with them taking a train journey together again after all the years apart. As they travel, the recollections begin to flow and the reader learns how they met as he embarks on the journey into the past.

‘And while the rattling wheels invisible below them rolled onward, into a future that each of them imagined differently, the thoughts of both returned in reverie to the past.’

At times the feelings expressed and the behaviour are so deeply romantic; I was struck by the lengths he goes to in order to keep her letters safe and dry and close by him all the time whilst he is in Mexico. Zweig uses language so effectively to capture and convey human emotions and passions. The translation reads very well throughout.

Journey into the Past took hold of my heart and drew me into the intensity of feeling that once existed between this man and woman; it made me curious as to whether all that remained between them now was nostalgia or whether any of that once deep connection remained. I find the author’s words captivating and his understanding of human relationships and human nature so true and believable.

I have previously read The Post Office Girl, and Journeys, by Stefan Zweig, and next on my list of his works to read is Chess. 

Published by Pushkin Press

I bought my copy of this novella.


Read as part of the 2013 Translation Challenge 

The Post Office Girl - Stefan Zweig

‘She has begun to find out who she is, and, having discovered this new world, to discover herself.’

Christine Hoflehner is the post office girl of the title, working in a village branch in Klein-Reifling, Austria, in the years after World War One. Her days are identical, each spent working away at the post office, just earning enough to make ends meet, and then returning to the small home she shares with her ailing mother. There is the constant awareness of most things being ‘too expensive’, of having to scrimp and save to survive.

Then one day an unexpected telegram arrives from Christine’s American aunt, a wealthy woman, inviting her to stay with her and her husband at a resort in the Swiss Alps. Not having had a break, let alone a holiday in years, after initial fear and apprehension Christine accepts the initiation. Traveling to meet them she is painfully aware and self-conscious as to her appearance, but as the journey goes on she becomes aware of the sights outside the train carriage window, and it dawns on her, with joy and surprise, that there is a whole world which she has never seen.

‘Indifferent and without desires before, now she’s beginning to realize what she’s been missing….This is her first glimpse of the unimaginable majesty of the Alps, and she sways with surprise…if not for the accident of this journey, she herself would have died, rotted away, and turned to dust with no inkling of their glory.’

Her stay at the resort with her aunt and uncle will irrevocably alter her life. She discovers a world of luxury, freedom and pleasure, surrounded by pretty clothes, beautiful interiors, exciting people, and she is intoxicated and totally swept away by it all. There are none of her usual worries about lack of money, of boredom and routine; everything is new and exciting, the world is there to be discovered, people to meet and places to see. She undergoes such a change in all aspects of her life; it is like a real Cinderella story, from rags to riches.

On waking on her first morning in the hotel, ‘she looks and around and remembers everything – vacation, holiday, freedom, Switzerland, her aunt, her uncle, the magnificent hotel! No worries, no responsibilities, no work, no time, no alarm clock! No stove, no one waiting, no pressure from anyone: the terrible mill of hardship that’s been crushing her life for ten years has ground to a halt for the first time….She feels self-confident and happy as never before.’

Suddenly having to return to her former life, to her job at the post office, to wear her old clothes again, to return to the village, having tasted this alternative, leaves Christine utterly devastated and ashamed. Looking at her old clothes in the hotel wardrobe, the language conveys how disgusted and black she feels about them and the life they remind her of; ‘the hated blouse she came in, dangling there as white and ghastly as a hanged man.’

Back in Klein-Reifling, ‘everything hideous, narrow, disagreeable about this little world she’s been pushed back into digs in its barbs until she can’t even feel her own pain.’ A chance meeting with an old friend of her brother-in-law in Vienna one Sunday, someone with whom she feels a common bond, will shape her life going forward.

What a moving, emotional novel that sees the human spirit briefly reach such happiness and then return to such deep despair, driven by a glimpse of what wealth can offer and dragged down by grinding poverty in the post war years. I feel the author has captured the drudgery and monotony that can overshadow a life, as well as the potential beauty. He has so convincingly demonstrated, through Christine, the highs and lows of capitalist society, and how this can affect one woman’s life. I felt such sympathy for her, having her hopes for a different life so suddenly raised and just as suddenly shattered.

The language is beautiful, the story compelling, and the pain palpable. This work was found after the author’s death by suicide in 1942. I would highly recommend it. 

I'm so glad that German Literature Month has meant that I finally read this novel.

Published by Sort of Books

I bought my copy of this book.