Book description
A DOCTOR IN the Dutch East Indies torn between his medical duty
to help and his own mixed emotions; a middle-aged maidservant whose
devotion to her master leads her to commit a terrible act; a hotel
waiter whose love for an unapproachable aristocratic beauty
culminates in an almost lyrical death and a prisoner-of-war longing
to be home again in Russia. In these four stories, Stefan Zweig
shows his gift for the acute analysis of emotional dilemmas. His
four tragic and moving cameos of the human condition are played out
against cosmopolitan and colonial backgrounds in the first half of
the twentieth century.
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a well-to-do
Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first
known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled
widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed literary fame.
His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with
the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British
citizenship. After a short period in New York; he settled in Brazil
where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double
suicide. ANTHEA BELL is the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for
translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the
Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald's
Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation.
She lives in Cambridge, England.
