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Burning Secret (Paperback)

by Stefan Zweig (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £10.00
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  • This item: Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

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Product details

  • Paperback: 128 pages
  • Publisher: Pushkin Press; Gift edition edition (28 Mar 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1901285855
  • ISBN-13: 978-1901285857
  • Product Dimensions: 16.4 x 12.2 x 1.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 89,375 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #6 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > Z > Zweig, Stefan
    #7 in  Books > Fiction > World > Austrian

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Product Description

Review
Zweig is the most adult of writers; civilised, urbane, but never jaded or cynical; a realist who none the less believed in the possibility - the necessity - of empathy. --The Independent

He was capable of making the reader live other people's deepest experience - which is a moral education in itself. My advice is that you should go out at once and buy his books. --The Sunday Telegraph

Reviving his reputation as a major writer of the 20th century. --The Independent

Product Description
A lonely twelve-year-old is befriended and is infatuated by a suave, mysterious baron. When his adored friend heartlessly brushes him aside and turns his seductive attentions to his mother, the boy's jealousy and feelings of betrayal become uncontrollable. This title is set in an Austrian sanatorium in the 1920s.

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A novella by a great and subtle story-teller, 14 Oct 2008
By Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)   
We must be grateful to the Pushkin Press for publishing a series of novellas by the wonderful Stefan Zweig, even if the cover price for these little gems of not much more than a hundred pages is a bit steep. But then, in extenuation, this and some of the other volumes have been newly and brilliantly translated by Anthea Bell.

We are in Zweig country. The scenery is wonderfully conveyed in the opening pages. The story is set in the eroticized atmosphere at the end of the Habsburg Empire. There are three characters: a suave baron, on holiday at a hotel, who is an accomplished, cold and determined seducer; an elegant woman who is his more than half-willing prey; and her lonely twelve-year-old son Edgar. The baron first opens his campaign by befriending the boy. Edgar responds passionately to the baron's apparent interest in him, but then he discovers, first with bewilderment and then with rage, that he is in fact de trop. We have to accept that the sheltered Edgar is more innocent than a twelve-year old boy would be today. He guesses that the adults are keeping something from him, but he cannot work out what that secret might be. But he takes his revenge by making sure that he would continue to be de trop, since this was obviously embarrassing and inhibiting them both.

I must not reveal the rest of the story; but it is tense and moving, and Edgar veers back and forth between dependent childhood and the first frightening steps of independence.

The thoughts of all three characters are described with the amplitude and subtlety that is characteristic of this very great writer.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Another rediscovery from Pushkin, 6 Dec 2008
A few months ago I read Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, an Austrian classic, which unfortunately plodded more than marched for me. Given its acknowledged masterpiece status, I am obviously out of step. There is more than one reason for this, but the main one is that as I read I kept wishing that Stefan Zweig had written it. Why? Because Zweig writes so vividly about his characters' dilemmas that the reader feels the pain. Roth holds his readers at a further distance and the experience isn't as enjoyable, as roller-coastery, if you will.

So the release of a new Zweig by Pushkin Press is a highly-anticipated event for me. This year's treat, the publication of the 1913 novella, Burning Secret. It is the story of a threesome: a 12-year old boy, his mother and an unscrupulous sexual predator. The drama is flagmarked in the very first chapter when the Baron first beholds the mother.

"The hunter had scented his prey."

She, however, is resistant to the Baron charms but her lonely sickly 12-year old son is not. Neither is the Baron above seducing (in a figurative way) the child to get to his intended target. It is a painful coming-of-age for the boy, who progresses from trusting innocence to deceitful spitefulness in the course of a few days. The emotional arc of the mother is no less profound. Her starting point:

"She was at that crucial age when a woman begins to regret having stayed faithful to a husband she never really loved, when the glowing sunset colours of her beauty offer her one last, urgent choice between maternal and feminine love."

Each chapter is written by an omniscient narrator using either the Baron's or Edgar's point-of-view. This results in an intense emotional experience. Events spiral out-of-control rapidly and very dramatically, the novella format ensuring the exclusion of anything extraneous to the central action. Yet even within these constraints Zweig finds time to paint delightful pictures of the mountain landscape.

"Spring was in the air. Those white clouds that are seen only in May and June sailed past in the sky, a company clad all in white, still young and flighty themselves, playfully chasing over the blue firmament, hiding suddenly behind high mountains, embracing and separating again, sometime crumpling up like handkerchiefs, sometimes fraying into shreds, and finally playing a practical joke on the mountains as they settled onto their heads like white caps."

If only the clouds over the characters' heads were as light and fluffy!
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A small masterpiece, 28 Oct 2008
By H. Carlton "autobiogfreak" (London, Eng.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Stefan Zweig has recently been "rediscovered", or perhaps what we mean is "reprinted"? Thank God for that. On this story alone, he rates as one of the great writers of the 20th Century.
Here he gets into the brain of a 12-year-old who is just discovering adult life. He is also discovering that his mother is a sensual female with adulterous leanings. It is wonderfully written and unputdownable. It will make you cry and laugh. And it will re-awaken your delight in clear, clean, wonderfully expressive language and an author who is a master at telling a story and revealing emotions. Don't read this review, read the book, and move on to his other books. He is a master, perhaps a genius.
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