{"product_id":"the-postoffice-girl-isbn-9781590172629","title":"The Post-Office Girl","description":"\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWes Anderson on Stefan Zweig:\u003c\/b\u003e  \"I had never heard of Zweig...when    I just more or less by chance bought a copy of \u003ci\u003eBeware of Pity\u003c\/i\u003e. I loved this    first book.  I also read    the \u003ci\u003eThe Post-Office\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eGirl\u003c\/i\u003e.  \u003ci\u003eThe Grand Budapest Hotel\u003c\/i\u003e has elements that were sort of stolen    from both these books. Two  characters in our story are vaguely meant to    represent Zweig himself —  our “Author” character, played by Tom Wilkinson,    and the  theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law.     But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph  Fiennes,    is modelled significantly on Zweig as well.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in  a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon,  as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed  to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that  Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train  ride, Christine finds herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege  that she had never imagined.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut Christine’s aunt drops her as abruptly as she picked  her up, and soon the young woman is back at the provincial post office, consumed  with disappointment and bitterness. Then she meets Ferdinand, a wounded but eloquent  war veteran who is able to give voice to the disaffection of his generation. Christine’s  and Ferdinand’s lives spiral downward, before Ferdinand comes up with a plan which  will be either their salvation or their doom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNever before published in English,  this extraordinary book is an unexpected and haunting foray into noir fiction by  one of the masters of the psychological novel.\u003c\/p\u003e“Is it possible to have a realist fairy story? If so, this is it. The characters are so well realised and observed, and there are passages of such imaginative immersion, that we owe its publisher our gratitude for bringing it into English for the first time. What a treat this book is”\u003ci\u003e. --The Spectator \u003c\/i\u003e(UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An exhilarating ski run of poverty, joy and misery... it is the girl's ecstatic naivety and Zweig's sparkling prose that makes the old stories so sweetly fresh and, when the whole dream collapses, so devastatingly sad”.\u003ci\u003e --The Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e (UK) \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In \u003ci\u003eThe Post-Office Gir\u003c\/i\u003el Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart...The story is poignant, painful, and must be one of fiction’s darkest indictments of how poverty destroys hope, enjoyment, beauty, brightness and laughter, and how money, no matter how falsely, provides ease and delight.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Spectator\u003c\/i\u003e (UK)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This is a fascinating depiction of the effects of history on individual lives.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Financial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Post Office Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is a fine novel and an excellent place to start if you are new to this great Austrian novelist. It is a powerful social history, describing in moving detail the social impact of the First World War, and the extreme poverty in which so many people were forced to live. It shows up the challenge to European civilisation of the early Thirties and the failure of humanism, in which Zweig believed until the end of his life. And it is remarkable for the bleak interior worlds it depicts of anxiety, self-doubt, depression and disintegration. Zweig succeeded in taking the most complex concepts of psychoanalysis and bringing them vividly to life.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Stefan Zweig was a late and magnificent bloom from the hothouse of fin de siecle Vienna...The posthumous publication of a Zweig novel affords an opportunity to revisit this gifted writer...\u003ci\u003eThe Post-Office Girl\u003c\/i\u003e is captivating.\" -\u003ci\u003e-The Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"... nowhere else in his fiction does Zweig confront the legacy of the Great War with as deep a social reach or as detailed a human sympathy as he does in \u003ci\u003eThe Post-Office Girl\u003c\/i\u003e... we are lucky to have the book, not only for its devastating picture of postwar Austrian life but also because it represents so radical a departure from Zweig's other fiction as to signal the existence of a hitherto unsuspected literary personality...\" —William Deresiewicz, \u003ci\u003eThe Nation \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[In this] ... beautiful translation by Joel Rotenberg.... Stefan Zweig finds a universal story of psychological struggle and spiritual testing in a bitter but humane indictment of class inequality. He finds a love story, of a sort, in a quest story, and a quest story in a love story. He finds anger in compassion, and compassion in anger; beauty in suffering, and suffering in beauty.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe New York Observer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Zweig is a] writer who understands perfectly the life he is describing, and who has great analytic gifts . . . \" –Stephen Spender, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Always [Zweig] remains essentially the same, revealing in all . . . mediums his subtlety of style, his profound psychological knowledge and his inherent humaneness.\" –Barthold Fles, \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"His writing reveals his sympathy for fellow human beings.\" –Ruth Franklin, \u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “The experience of reading Zweig is not so much of entering the world of the story as of plunging inward and dreaming the story.” –Rachel Cohen, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A brilliant writer.” –Louis Kronenberger, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Admired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini, Thomas Mann and Herman Goering.” –Edwin McDowell, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eStefan Zweig\u003c\/b\u003e (1881—1942) spent his youth studying philosophy and the history of literature in Vienna and belonged to a pan-European cultural circle that included Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss. In 1934, under National Socialism, Zweig fled Austria for England, where he authored several novels, short stories, and biographies. In 1941 Zweig and his second wife traveled to Brazil, where they both committed suicide. NYRB Classics published his novels \u003ci\u003eChess Story\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBeware of Pity\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJoel Rotenberg\u003c\/b\u003e has produced NYRB original translations for Stefan Zweig’s \u003ci\u003eChess Story\u003c\/i\u003e and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s \u003ci\u003eThe Lord Chandos Letter\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303792562405,"sku":"NP9781590172629","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590172629.jpg?v=1767741018","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-postoffice-girl-isbn-9781590172629","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}