The Post-office Girl (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

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Review
""The Post Office Girl" 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." --"The Telegraph"
"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..."The Post-Office Girl" is captivating." -"-The Wall Street Journal"
.,." 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 "The Post-Office Girl,.". 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, "The Nation"
"[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. Hefinds anger in compassion, and compassion in anger; beauty in suffering, and suffering in beauty." --"The New York Observer"
"[Zweig is a] writer who understands perfectly the life he is describing, and who has great analytic gifts . . ." -Stephen Spender, "The New York Review of Books"
"Always [Zweig] remains essentially the same, revealing in all . . . mediums his subtlety of style, his profound psychological knowledge and his inherent humaneness." -Barthold Fles, "The New Republic"
"His writing reveals his sympathy for fellow human beings." -Ruth Franklin, "London Review of Books"
"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, "Bookforum"
"A brilliant writer." -Louis Kronenberger, "The New York Times"
"Admired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini, Thomas Mann and Herman Goering." -Edwin McDowell, "The New York Times"

Review
'An extraordinary work ... there's a volcanic energy to Zweig's writing ... wholly mesmerising.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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34 Reviews 5 star:  (11) 4 star:  (15) 3 star:  (5) 2 star:  (2) 1 star:  (1)           Average Customer Review 4.0 out of 5 stars (34 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   6 of 6 people found the following review helpful: 3.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking, 3 Mar 2009 By  Snazzy-baz "snazzy-baz" (UK) - See all my reviews    This review is from: The Post Office Girl (Paperback) Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?) The story is about a young Austrian girl,Christine who lives in poverty with her sick mother, and works in a post office, just after World War 1. She unexpectedly receives an invitation from a rich aunt (who'd never previously had contact with her) to join her on a holiday in Switzerland. She arrives feeling ashamed of her poor clothes and obvious poverty, but like the Fairy Godmother, the aunt soon transforms her with the aid of a few shopping sprees and a make-over, and soon Christine is transformed and accepted by the posh young set at the hotel. I won't spoil the ending for you, but suddenly the aunt decides to send Christine packing, and Christine is unable to settle or accept her old life, and becomes bad-tempered and solitary. It is then that she meets Ferdinand, a kindred spirit who is also unable to accept his undeserved lot in life. This is when they hatch their plan ... The story is quite intense, deep and thought-provoking. It certainly brings home how we can take what we have for granted, and how easily it can be taken away. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   5 of 5 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Crisis? What crisis?, 28 Jan 2009 By  P. Millar "dazzle750" (UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)       This review is from: The Post Office Girl (Paperback) Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?) There are some books which still feel relevant whenever they are read, no matter when they were written. This is one such book. Discovered after the author had committed suicide in 1942 after having fled Nazi Germany it is the tale of a girl, the 'Post Office Girl' of the title, who, for a few days, gets to experience the rich life in Switzerland before being dumped back into obscurity. It details the clash between feeling important and being someone because you have money, and the frustration and obscurity of those without money who feel cheated by the Austrian state. It is a tale of hope and despair, of dreams realised and broken. Set in 1926 with Austria in economic crisis due to the First World War it is truly a clash of cultures - between those who probably don't realise anything is wrong and those who feel it too keenly - the writing throws you straight into this situation and there is not a word out of place here. The plot is taut and carries you with it right inside the head of the Post Office Girl. I can't reccommend this book highly enough. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   21 of 26 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars "Which way shall I fly? Infinite wrath and infinite despair?, 20 Jun 2008 By  Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)       . . . and in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still threatening to devour me, opens wide, To which the he ll I suffer seems a heaven." John Milton, Paradise Lost There are some books that you can finish, put back down on the table and five-minutes later have it virtually erased from your consciousness. Stefan Zweig's "The Post-Office Girl" stayed with me long after I put the book down. It is a brilliantly crafted book that looks at the mind-boggling despair that can crush the soul out of just about anyone. What makes the book memorable is the fact that Zweig does not write with an overwhelming appeal to pathos. No, instead, Zweig is direct and his narrative manages to convey this sense of despair without drowning the reader in rhetorical devices aimed at soliciting. The setting is post World War I Austria in the 1920s. The Austro-Hungarian empire has been dismantled after the Treaty of Versailles and Austria, like her ally Germany, is suffering the `economic consequences of the peace'. The Post-Office Girl is Christine Hoflehner. At the war's outset, Christine and her family enjoyed a comfortable middle-class existence in Vienna. But the war and the economic suffering brought on by the hyper-inflation of the 1920s has booted Christine out of Vienna and her middle class life. She and her mother live at the poverty level in a one-room bed-sitter in a village two hours from Vienna. Christine works as a low-ranking postal official in the town's post office. As the story opens she's in her 20s and merely going through the motions. But her robot-like existence is shattered when she receives a telegram (a big event) from an aunt, her mother's sister, who left Austria before the war and married a rich American businessman. They invite Christine to spend a holiday with them in a Swiss mountain resort. Christine goes grudgingly but is astonished at the life she is exposed too. Her aunt buys her beautiful clothes, feeds her well and all of a sudden Christine is exposed to a life she never knew existed. She takes to it immediately. She relishes her new life and cherishes every minute of it. But no sooner has she found a new life than she is tossed back into the old one. Any despair Christine may have felt before her Swiss trip is now magnified by the fact that she has actually seen how different life can be. She arrives at what she thought was the lowest deep only to discover that there are depths of despair yet to go. It is at this point that she finds Ferdinand on a day trip to Vienna. For Ferdinand life has been, if anything, unkind to him than to Christine. Their meeting and their developing relationship takes us through the second half of the book. They know they are soul mates but their existence is such that they each know that love (if you can call their fumbling attempts at personal physical and social intimacy love) is not nearly enough to be of any help to them at all. They face the question posed by Milton in the heading of this review - which way shall they fly? Zweig's resolution is, in this context, perfect. What Zweig has done so well in my opinion is to use Christine and Ferdinand as a masterful vehicle for looking at Austrian (and Europe generally) society in the aftermath of the Great War. Zweig's characters are well crafted and felt very realistically drawn to me. They were absorbing, warts and all. "The Post-Office Girl" was well worth reading and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in reading a book that lingers with you after you are done. L. Fleisig Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all 34 customer reviews...		Ad feedback   Most Recent Customer Reviews 4.0 out of 5 stars Post Office Girl Well worth reading. Read it in two days, lent it, lent it again.Bought another by the same author immediately. Very well written and translated Published 15 days ago by A. P. Mackay 4.0 out of 5 stars Must read!! It took a while to get into this but was worth the effort once I did. This was truly one of the most poignant novels I have read & will stay with me for a long time I am... Read more Published 22 days ago by T. Andrews 4.0 out of 5 stars Written With Such Emotion It's a crying shame that this book has not been published in English before now - written prior to 1948, published first in German in 1982 and this publication in English in 2008... Read more Published 22 days ago by A. Rose 4.0 out of 5 stars A thoughtful and intense slow-burner The Post Office Girl explores the misery of the lower-middle classes in post-WW1 Austria. Christine is scraping out a living as a post office clerk in the village of... Read more Published 1 month ago by nicola1459 1.0 out of 5 stars Don't bother. Really. I'm sorry to say that this is the first bad review I've given an item on Amazon. The story is long, conveluted and very boring. Read more Published 1 month ago by Mlle J. Taylor 5.0 out of 5 stars A Rediscovered Masterpiece It is shocking that a novel of this calibre has remained relatively obscure for so many decades. How many other masterpieces are there that haven't been translated? Read more Published 1 month ago by Steerforth 4.0 out of 5 stars Blessed are the poor? Hardly! The blurb says that this book is `a reworking of the Cinderella story', but that is misleading. The original Cinderella story is about a poor down-trodden girl whom a fairy... Read more Published 2 months ago by Ralph Blumenau 4.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical This is a lyrical reflection on the haves and have-nots of the 1920's which feels as if it reflects a lot of the author's raw emotions at the time. Read more Published 2 months ago by MaryAnne 4.0 out of 5 stars Raw and powerful - a twisted fairy tale The Post Office Girl is a novel set in the dark days of post-First-World-War Austria, with the Great War lost and the Austro-Hungarian Empire dead. Read more Published 2 months ago by Stealth Reviewer 5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, sensitive, coming-of-age love story There are lots of detailed criticism and background on this novel. The bottom line for me is that I thought this was one of the most beautiful and moving novels I have read in... Read more Published 3 months ago by Angus Jenkinson Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews › See all 34 customer reviews...

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