Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers ‘to see.’ In The Post Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart.
Born in 1881 into a rich Austrian-Jewish family, Zweig was the embodiment of pre- and inter-war Viennese intellectual life. A biographer, essayist, memoirist, short-story writer and the author of one finished novel, Beware of Pity, he delivered the oration at Freud’s funeral. During the Thirties, Zweig wrote The Post Office Girl, originally Rausch der Verwandlung (The Intoxication of Transformation). The English title is better. In his informative afterword, William Deresiewicz writes that Zweig tinkered with this novel for years and never finished it. He and his wife killed themselves in 1942, dying hand in hand in Brazil. The manuscript of The Post Office Girl was discovered after Zweig’s death.
The story is poignant, painful, and must be one of fiction’s darkest indictments of how poverty destroys hope, enjoyment, beauty, brightness and laughter, and how money, no matter how falsely, provides ease and delight.
In 1926, in the backwater Austrian town of Klein-Reifling, Christine, age 28, single-handedly runs the dingy post office. Pale, faded and careless of appearance, she endures a grimly repetitive existence tending her rheumatic mother in their cramped attic room. She can remember the last time she laughed, felt happy, and contented — years before the Great War that ruined her family’s life.
From the first pages, long before we meet Christine, we see how awful her life is. As if in slow motion Zweig shows us the office’s rickety desk, the single chair, the dried-up ink in the well, the crushed pen nib, and the posters advertising long-closed exhibitions.
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