Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. von D. (1927)

Not Zweig's best, it feels a tad lightweight in parts (perhaps things are too obvious?). As always with the author, it's wonderfully written, though I think his best work was completed in his short stories. ( )

In this, a seemingly directionless young student is suddenly inspired by a passionate professor of Shakespeare. The relationships between the student, the professor and his young wife are complicated and they (and the reader) go through a rollercoaster of emotions. It's hard to write a review of this without a lot of spoilers .. so I'll just say that this is a great study of student/mentor, psychological challenges, cultural taboos and expectations. ( )

http://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/recent-reads-confusion-b... ( )

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT - (though I think you'd have to be pretty dense not to realize what's going on after the first forty pages)

"The love that dare not speak its name" in Wilhelmine Germany. Zweig's novella from 1926 is dated, but interestingly so. A tale of pedagogy and repression - and in the NYRB edition, beautifully translated by Anthea Bell. ( )

I picked up the novella known to me as [La confusion des sentiments] yesterday on audio, which I'd gotten from the library in the French translation read by an excellent narrator, Daniel Mesguich, a French-Algerian actor and director in theater and opera. I ended up doing lots of things around the house I'd put off for weeks and months just so I could listen to the whole thing in one 'sitting' so to speak. There's something about Zweig's writing I find deeply satisfying. He seems to go to the centre of human feeling and look at what moves us in a manner both unflinching, and also very gentle, perhaps because of all the attention to the finer movements of the heart he delves on. I had started this audiobook some months back and couldn't concentrate and so decided to put it off to a time when I felt more receptive to it, and I'm glad I did. It's a story told in the first person by a beautiful and naive young man of nineteen who initially has little or no interest in literature and studying, who on his first day at a new university meets a professor whose passionate delivery about Shakespeare and the Elizabethans is so mesmerizing that he becomes instantly enamoured of both the subject and the professor, both of which he decides to dedicate himself to heart and soul. Pure poetry and complex and satisfying character studies. ( )