Beware of Pity (New York Review Books Classics)
Beware of Pity (New York Review Books Classics)
- ISBN13: 9781590172001
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
“Stefan Zweig was a dark and unorthodox artist; it’s good to have him back.”–Salman Rushdie
The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings.
Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host’s lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.
Rating: 
(out of 20 reviews)
List Price: $ 16.95
Price: $ 9.00
Review by Jeff Abell for Beware of Pity (New York Review Books Classics)
Rating:
Zweig was one of the world’s best known and respected authors in the 1920s and 1930s. The burning of his books by the Nazis, and the subsequent changes in taste after the war have relegated most of his books to an undeserved obscurity. As a personal friend of Freud (Zweig gave the eulogy at Freud’s funeral), he understood brilliantly how to portray the psychological state of his characters. This novel is particularly rich in that regard, as the main character finds himself facing a series of moral and spiritual choices he is ill-prepared to make. In an attempt to apologize for a social mistake (unintentionally insulting his host’s daughter at a party), he finds himself ever more absorbed into the life and concerns of this family. Every time he’s faced with a difficult choice, he gives way to his emotions, and invariably makes matters worse. Zweig’s original title, “Impatience of the Heart,” aptly describes Toni Hofmiller’s problem: he ignores logic and discretion to follow his feelings. We all live in a society that tends to view human emotions as the most important factor in human interaction. Zweig’s genius lies to demonstrating for us what a questionable assumption that is. One of the finest novels I’ve ever read (and that’s saying something).
Review by jlaudan@omm.com for Beware of Pity (New York Review Books Classics)
Rating:
Toni Hofmiller, a 25 year-old lieutenant in the Austrian army prior to the outbreak of WWI, meets Edith, the daughter of the local magnate. Toni committs a “gaffe”, asking her to dance while not realizing until too late that Edith is handicapped and cannot walk. Suddenly Toni becomes aware of (and, as an immature youth, is trapped by) the power of compassion. Through no fault of his own (unless good intentions can make one culpable), he leads Edith and her father to believe that Edith may be cured.”Beware of Pity” has been called a psychological novel, perhaps because the narrator (Toni) alternates in describing his feelings of self-love, power and satisfaction (when visiting Edith and thus sharing his goodness and compassion), and those of confusion and despair when realizing, unwittingly, that Edith has fallen in love with him. He is driven deeper into despair when told by Dr. Condor, Edith’s doctor, that Edith may die if her love is unrequited. In analyzing the conflicted feelings of Toni, Zweig wrote a formidable novel of compassion and responsibility for one’s actions. Dr. Condor serves as the literary foil of Toni; the doctor’s true compassion for Edith (i.e., “unsentimental but productive, that knows what it wants and is ready to share in one’s suffering to the limit, and beyond”) contrasts starkly with Toni’s unbridled compassion, which is nothing more than the other type of compassion, false, fleeting and unreliable, “the impatience of the heart” (which, incidentally, in the direct translation of the title from the original German). Zweig does not fault Toni for his youthful immaturity, as shown by Dr. Condor’s feelings for Toni. Zweig does not, however, exonerate him from blame, and the tale moves forward, inexorably, to its tragic end.
Review by Mara Kurtz for Beware of Pity (New York Review Books Classics)
Rating:
“Beware of Pity” is a brilliant book by one of the world’s great writers. This fascinating “psychological” novel is reminiscent of “Rebecca” in the way the story unfolds slowly and then totally envelops the reader. I actually read it straight through the first time, had to miss the next day’s work. I’ve loved it just as much with each reread.Zweig writes beautifully. He demonstrates elegance, economy, subtlety. There is never a wasted word. While you are at it, read his short story “The Royal Game.”
These are two examples of fiction at its very best.
Review by Shalom Freedman for Beware of Pity (New York Review Books Classics)
Rating:
In the introduction to this book Joan Acocella tells Zweig’s story as a writer. One of her claims is that despite his enormous popularity as biographer, essayist, writer of great novellas and stories, this novel is his masterpience. The novel is in essence the story of a feeling, of ‘pity’ of how it becoming the obsession and duty of the main character turns self- serving and destructive. Briefly , the book revolves around the relationship between a poor Austrian officer Hoffstein and a crippled seventeen year old daughter of a wealthy family Edith Kekesfalvas. After he has inadvertently insulted her by having asked her to dance he becomes bound into a relationship with her, in which she falls deeply in love with him without his truly reciprocating. This is how Acocella reads the protagonist’s reasoning and its result after her doctor informs him that it would be disastrous for him to abandon her.
“So he descends ever deeper into hypocrisy. In the process, Zweig gives us a piercing analysis of the motives underlying pity. Gradually Hofmiller realizes how much he enjoys the courtesies paid to him for his emotional services, how it pleases him that when he arrives at the Schloss his favorite cigarettes–and also the novel (its pages already cut) that he had said in passing that he wanted to read–are laid out on the tea table. Nor is it lost on him that his own sense of strength is magnified by Edith’s weakness and, above all, by his growing power over the Kekesfalvas, the fact that if he, a poor soldier, does not present himself at teatime, this great, rich household is thrown into a panic, and the chauffeur is dispatched to town to spy him out and see what he is doing in preference to waiting on Edith. Beyond the matter of power, however, Hofmiller finds that the emotion of pity is a pleasure just in itself. It exalts him, takes him to a new place. Before, as an officer, he was required only to obey orders and be a good fellow. Now he is a moral being, a soul.”
This end in destruction is somehow a foreshadowing of what would happen to Zweig.Having been betrayed with the rise of the Nazis by the Europe he loves, tried to make a new home and life with his second wife in Brazil. But it does not work out and the both of them are found after having taken fatal overdoes of drugs hands intertwined.
Review by Erik Wuttke for Beware of Pity (New York Review Books Classics)
Rating:
This is one of the most purely enjoyable books I have ever read, Zweig writes very well and at times brilliantly in creating characters both psychologically consistent and vivid. This is one of a rare type of novels that offers thrilling, page turning excitement combined with emotional and intellectual depth. Beware of Pity is not the most subtle, or beautiful book I have ever read but I can’t tell you any other that was more of a pleasure to read.