Book description
In the autumn of his days, a distinguished privy councillor
contemplates his past and looks back at the key moments of his life. A
reluctant and indolent student, he recalls a chance meeting with a
reclusive professor and his frustrated wife, with whom he ends up
sharing lodgings. His thirst for knowledge leads him to form an
ambiguous and close relationship with the professor. But the professor
harbours a secret which changes and scars both men for ever.
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 enjoying 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.
