Why you should read Stefan Zweig's 'The Post-Office Girl'

"She saw the world in its light: everything was ugly, malignant, and hostile.."

If I could express the totality of Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office girl in one word, I would use ‘rage’. This is an angry novel. One seeped in frustration, resentment and embitterment. A posthumous work officially published in 1982, it details the life of civil servant, Christine Hoflener. A post-office worker in her late twenties who physically survived The Great War but still reels in the aftermath of a country economically ravaged.

Something had happened to her; she knew it herself. It was as though someone had sprinkled some venom into her eyes while she slept, so that now she saw the world in its light: everything was ugly, malignant, and hostile when viewed with malignant and hostile eyes. She began every day in a rage.

A sequence of events rapidly arise, as she is invited by her wealthy American aunt and uncle to join them at a prestigious hotel in the Swiss Alps. For less than a week, Christine becomes ‘Christl Van Boolen’. She enters a world of complete opulence and decadence in which she hadn’t even begin to fathom before. Fortified with a makeover and a new wardrobe, she quickly navigates the underpinnings of the ruling class. Enraptured, she embodies all its delights and strikes a variety of relationships with all around her. From a lonely Count to a scheming academic. Until, the experience abruptly ends and she’s forced to return to her remote village. Plunged back into her miserable provincial life.

What follows is a character that struggles with her poverty amidst the knowledge of a richer, fuller life that exists just out of reach. As John Banville says in his article for the Guardian, “Zweig captures with tenderness and sharp immediacy the sensuous awakening of a soul long held in hopeless thrall by financial and spiritual poverty.” In turn I admired a myriad of techniques and choices made by Zweig. Pleasantly surprised at how he reworks the classic ‘Cinderella’ story. Whenever I thought the narrative would move in one direction, he takes a completely different approach.

His voice is actually somewhat dry, but it soars musically when he's in the grip of emotion. His timid and somewhat cramped soul always feels subtly more expansive when he looks up from the book and sees the young woman listening.

I discovered Zweig through his novella, Chess Story. A rapid, beautifully written work that simmered off the page. I was engrossed in that short piece of fiction. Astounded at the full extent in what literature can attain. I immediately sought to buy his other works such as ‘Beware of Pity’, ‘Six Stories’ and ‘The Post Office Girl’. Which achieves the similar notes of a sharp, expertly crafted novel. Found amongst his remains after a tragic double suicide this book confronts the ordeal of the First World War.

What I noticed as reading Zweig is his ability to meticulously construct a sentence that possesses two glorious accomplishments:

I) An acute selection of words that rolls off the tongue in a seamless fashion, thus making the combination of sentences a sublime read without it becoming dull nor derivative.

II) Its essence. He writes: “Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.” The type of excerpt that makes you run into the streets and exclaim it as if it were gospel to the nearest person you encounter.

You’d forget that Zweig writes in German. With a clear, articulate and brilliantly expressive prose that continues to rival that of contemporary authors. It speaks volumes to the prowess of good translation. At times, in the novel it does lean into verbose and it could’ve been 30 pages shorter but its moves in a desperate, downward spiral after our protagonist meets Ferdinand. A frustrated ex-soldier, who had yearned to become an architect but due to the war was left in ruin with little prospects of hope. The second half is riddled in bitterness, desolation and class frustration. What startled me the most was a clear parallel between The Great War and the Covid-19 pandemic. As Christine felt her youth, vitality and family fortune robbed by global forces out of her control.

Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.

Propulsive, sad, at times disheartening but immensely angry, The Post Office Girl is a novel that blazes with reverence a century later after it had been written. Zweig has been such an immense pleasure to discover and I cannot wait to read the rest of his catalogue.