Stefan Zweig's "Beware of Pity": A Review

I gather that Wes Anderson has contributed to something of a mini-vogue for the works of Stefan Zweig in recent years -- as en vogue as this sort of thing can ever be --by doing little more than making public references to his work in relation to a recent film. (I am reminded of the consternation and rage one of my high school English teachers always expressed over the fact that Oprah -- by means of her book club -- was apparently able to "claim," and thereby emblazon her name onto virtually any work of literature in circulation, without having contributed in any way to the book in question. When this fate befell his beloved Faulkner, it was almost too much for him to bear.) If you come to Zweig's Beware of Pity by this particular trail of bread crumbs -- the Andersonian one -- you will probably be expecting to find in the novel picturesque details of the late Hapsburg social life that would soon crumble into dust with the guns of august.

Five Poems

I.

The weighty politician rose to address the floor –
Reserving his most withering looks for the members of the press
Who with truth had tortured him
 With probity persecuted
Through many a legislation past—
And those who were there assembled would ever afterward recall
The speech as his finest hour.

Whence this Rage?

I have had occasion to note several times over the past few years watching the American political scene-- if that's still the term for it -- a curious statistical fact: it is the consistent inverse correlation between the level of paranoia and vitriol a person seems to express, and the actual danger in which they live. The porcelain fragility of our current president's ego would be the obvious example. Let us begin there.

Observe. See him there, swishing his tale in his oval-shaped shark tank. Here is a man who -- in the midst of a total lack of qualifications and deservedness -- somehow has managed to obtain and hold onto the single most powerful political office in the globe. This is a man who is free as perhaps no other currently on the planet to live out the full scope of his megalomanic fantasies. Yet it is no less evident that he labors each day under a hag-ridden delirium filled with imagined "enemies" and threats.

Dorothy Baker's "Cassandra at the Wedding" (1962): A Review

Perhaps there are works of literature of such outstanding intrinsic quality that they can be read at any moment in one's life and still equally convey their luminosity and inspiration. The jury is out on that one. What is more certain is that there are books that ought to be saved up for a very particular time or mental state -- ones that are such a perfect distillation of a single mood that they are perhaps best kept on a shelf untouched until one can be sure one is in the worst throes of it oneself, and then taken down and devoured. Not so much because they show a way out of a given emotional predicament, as because the flawless expression of an emotion is always somehow a salve to it.

Thus, Cassandra at the Wedding. On a list of books I have maintained on my computer more of less without interruption since high school, Dorothy Baker's short 1962 novel found an early place. This list, I should explain, is designed for those books that I haven't yet read, and perhaps don't really intend to any time soon, but which I dimly sense are going to come in useful someday.