Book description
In 1913 a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible danger of
pity. He had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance --
his compensatory afternoon calls relieve his guilt but give her a
dangerous glimmer of hope.
Stefan Zweig's only novel is a devastating depiction of the
torment of the betrayal
of both honour and love, realised against
the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy
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 bed 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.
