Burning Secret and Other Stories

By Stefan Zweig

Book Overview

BURNING SECRET is set in an Austrian sanatorium in the 1920's. A lonely twelve-year-old boy is befriended and becomes infatuated by a suave and mysterious baron who heartlessly brushes him aside to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525484965
• ISBN13: 9780525484967
• Release Date: April 1989
• Publisher: Plume
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.0" x 1.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Great

My copy of the book was in excellent condition and was sent in a timely manner.

A novella by a great and subtle story teller

We must be grateful to the Pushkin Press for publishing a series of novellas by the wonderful Stefan Zweig, and this and some of the other volumes have been newly and brilliantly translated by Anthea Bell. We are in Zweig country. The scenery is wonderfully conveyed in the opening pages. The story is set in the eroticized atmosphere at the end of the Habsburg Empire. There are three characters: a suave baron, on holiday at a hotel, who is an accomplished, cold and determined seducer; an elegant woman who is his more than half-willing prey; and her lonely twelve-year-old son Edgar. The baron first opens his campaign by befriending the boy. Edgar responds passionately to the baron's apparent interest in him, but then he discovers, first with bewilderment and then with rage, that he is in fact de trop. We have to accept that the sheltered Edgar is more innocent than a twelve-year old boy would be today. He guesses that the adults are keeping something from him, but he cannot work out what that secret might be. But he takes his revenge by making sure that he would continue to be de trop, since this was obviously embarrassing and inhibiting them both. I must not reveal the rest of the story; but it is tense and moving, and Edgar veers back and forth between dependent childhood and the first frightening steps of independence. The thoughts of all three characters are described with the amplitude and subtlety that is characteristic of this very great writer.