Specify Of Books The Post-Office Girl
Title | : | The Post-Office Girl |
Author | : | Stefan Zweig |
Book Format | : | Paperback |
Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
Pages | : | Pages: 257 pages |
Published | : | April 15th 2008 by NYRB Classics (first published 1982) |
Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Historical. Historical Fiction. European Literature. German Literature |
Stefan Zweig
Paperback | Pages: 257 pages Rating: 4.04 | 4572 Users | 538 Reviews
Interpretation To Books The Post-Office Girl
2009 PEN Translation Prize FinalistThe logic of capitalism, boom and bust, is unremitting and unforgiving. But what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world? In The Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism.
Christine toils in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine’s rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same again.
Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within.
Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde in Zweig’s haunting and hard-as-nails novel, completed during the 1930s, as he was driven by the Nazis into exile, but left unpublished at the time of his death. The Post-Office Girl, available here for the first time in English, transforms our image of a modern master’s achievement.
Identify Books In Favor Of The Post-Office Girl
Original Title: | Rausch der Verwandlung |
ISBN: | 1590172620 (ISBN13: 9781590172629) |
Edition Language: | English |
Literary Awards: | BTBA Best Translated Book Award Nominee for Fiction shortlist (2009), PEN Translation Prize Nominee for Joel Rotenberg (2009) |
Rating Of Books The Post-Office Girl
Ratings: 4.04 From 4572 Users | 538 ReviewsComment On Of Books The Post-Office Girl
Wonderful review!, did you ever get to find that film?I really liked how I didn't know where this was going for the longest time. Right up until the end, really. Oh, the bitterness! I loved it. So many quotable passages.(view spoiler)[Although how great wouldn't it have been if he'd killed her in the post office upon seeing all that cash, and robbed the place? I really thought that would happen. (hide spoiler)]
Would it really be a kindness to take a person living their entire life thus far in dull poverty and transport them for 8 days into the very lap of capitalistic luxury, in full knowledge that at the end of the vacation, they would be returned to their previous life?Christine was one such person, living in post-war Austria with her ailing mother, knowing nothing but poverty and a dreary job in her little town's post office. Her wealthy American aunt, having a sudden attack of conscience, decides
The Post Office Girl is a story about a poor, young postal worker, Christine, who gets the chance of a lifetime to have a very brief, but wonderfully transforming vacation from her poverty-stricken life. She is allowed to taste luxury and all that money can buy in a world of wealth and happiness she has never known. This story takes place in Austria after WW1 and is an indictment against Austrian society, or society in general, and the way it allowed the soldiers of WW1 and their families to
This is a novel for today, an odd thing to say, considering it was written almost seventy years ago. It's a tragic version of the Cinderella story, a version with no glass slipper and no Prince Charming; it's a story of a girl taken to the heights only to be plunged back into the depths.The author, Stephan Zweig, though not that well known in the English-speaking world, is probably the best late representative of the culture of old Vienna, that urbane, tolerant, sophisticated and brilliant
I liked this book a lot. It has many excellent qualities and it's themes and implications resonate as strongly now as when it was written. We live in a time when people are suddenly elevated to the vapid realms of celebrity because they have appeared on a particular television programme; had a liaison with a President or marry someone wealthy. The newspapers which feel they have delivered fame to these people always follow the trajectory of an arc. The adoration reaches a peak and then, with
(view spoiler)[ Bettie's Books (hide spoiler)]
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