Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig, Joan Acocella (Introduction), Phyllis Blewitt (Translator), Trevor Blewitt (Translator)

Overview

In 1913 a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible dangers 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 devastatingly unindulgent realization of the torment of the betrayal of both honor and love, realized against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Author Biography: 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. In 1934 he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York he settled in Brazil in 1942.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590172001
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	06/20/2006
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	392
Sales rank:	131,436
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

STEPHAN ZWEIG (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. 1n 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. New York Review Books recently republished his novel, Chess Story, in Fall 2005.

JOAN ACOCELLA is a staff writer for The New Yorker and contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books. Her latest books is Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism.

Editorial Reviews

"Beware of Pity, his first venture in longer fiction, is original and powerful work...Zweig has chronicled a hopeless and tragic relationship in a manner that so holds the reader as never to dispirit him, telling a story full of psychological pitfalls that only an experienced writer, and an experienced human being could dare to attempt...Zweig remains, after Beware of Pity, what he seemed to be—in his novelettes and biographies—before he wrote it: a brilliant writer." —The New York Times

"Admired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini, Thomas Mann and Herman Goering." —The New York Times

"Herr Zweig presents this story with considerable skill, with compelling force...It is a good story." —The New York Times

"What is so impressive about Beware of Pity is Zweig's ability to make us feel the violently shifting emotions of all his characters as if they were our own. Only a writer of great sensitivity could do this. His theme, or moral, which he does not obtrude on us in any clumsy way, is that impulsive pity for others is a dangerous emotion with embroils us in false situations, often with disastrous results." —Sunday Telegraph

"Beware of Pity is an utterly unsparing dissection of the corruptions of false pity...In stripping away the lies with which we disguise our true desires from ourselves, Zweig lays bare the larger lies of the age: it was, in fact, the perfect novel for that 'low, dishonest decade,' as Auden termed it." —The New York Sun

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