The Post-Office Girl
While at the Neue Galerie in New York, I picked up a copy of a novel that (obviously) caught my eye: The Post-Office Girl, by Stefan Zweig, written in the 1930's.
A week later, I've finished it.
It was kind of an incredible story, leading one through the dismal life of Christine, an Austrian postal worker in the 1920s whose youth was irrevocably lost to the hardship and pain of World War I. One day a telegram arrives from her estranged aunt, who fled the country before the war and only now comes to realize that her wealth might have been of some use to her family back home. In penance, she offers to host Christine at a luxurious Alpine hotel for two weeks. Christine goes, at first mortified by her displacement into a world of snobbery and then drawn in by gifts from her aunt and attention showered on her by people who have no idea she is poor. Before long Christine begins to forget herself, becoming carefree and open to all sorts of experiences, especially with men. Her aunt finds out and send her home.
Once home, Christine is miserable and rails against the unfairness of poverty. Soon she meets a man with radical politics like her own, and they become lovers. When money begins to run out and they can no longer travel to see each other, they decide to commit suicide together to escape the unending drudgery of life. At the last minute her lover realizes that she has access to large amounts of money that goes through the post office accounts. They draw up a scheme to steal it and escape the country to live undercover with their new-found wealth. In the dark, at a construction site, they agree on a final plan. And then the book ends.
At first I was pissed. Then I looked the book up and found out that it was published posthumously. Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte were forced to leave Europe in the late 1930s due to their hereditary (but not observant) Jewishness. They bounced from England to the United States to Brazil, where in 1942 he wrote a short letter declaring that everything he had ever cared about was coming to an end at the hands of the Nazis, from European culture to art to justice. Then he and his wife committed a double suicide, found later hand-in-hand.
The book was found in "great disarray" and published. No one knows what was supposed to happen at the end.
Like Zweig himself, it ends with a pact formed in desperation. An unfinished story.
A week later, I've finished it.
It was kind of an incredible story, leading one through the dismal life of Christine, an Austrian postal worker in the 1920s whose youth was irrevocably lost to the hardship and pain of World War I. One day a telegram arrives from her estranged aunt, who fled the country before the war and only now comes to realize that her wealth might have been of some use to her family back home. In penance, she offers to host Christine at a luxurious Alpine hotel for two weeks. Christine goes, at first mortified by her displacement into a world of snobbery and then drawn in by gifts from her aunt and attention showered on her by people who have no idea she is poor. Before long Christine begins to forget herself, becoming carefree and open to all sorts of experiences, especially with men. Her aunt finds out and send her home.
Once home, Christine is miserable and rails against the unfairness of poverty. Soon she meets a man with radical politics like her own, and they become lovers. When money begins to run out and they can no longer travel to see each other, they decide to commit suicide together to escape the unending drudgery of life. At the last minute her lover realizes that she has access to large amounts of money that goes through the post office accounts. They draw up a scheme to steal it and escape the country to live undercover with their new-found wealth. In the dark, at a construction site, they agree on a final plan. And then the book ends.
At first I was pissed. Then I looked the book up and found out that it was published posthumously. Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte were forced to leave Europe in the late 1930s due to their hereditary (but not observant) Jewishness. They bounced from England to the United States to Brazil, where in 1942 he wrote a short letter declaring that everything he had ever cared about was coming to an end at the hands of the Nazis, from European culture to art to justice. Then he and his wife committed a double suicide, found later hand-in-hand.
The book was found in "great disarray" and published. No one knows what was supposed to happen at the end.
Like Zweig himself, it ends with a pact formed in desperation. An unfinished story.