The Post-Office Girl: A New Translation
Christine Hoflehner is twenty-eight years old, works behind the counter of a provincial Austrian post office, and cares for her invalid mother on wages that barely cover the rent. It is 1926. The war ended eight years ago, but for Christine - and for most of Austria - the ending changed very little. She has no expectations. She endures.
Then a telegram arrives from a wealthy American aunt she has never met, inviting her to a luxury resort in the Swiss Alps. For a few extraordinary weeks, Christine lives in a world she did not know existed - fine clothes, beautiful rooms, people who have never once worried about money - and discovers, to her amazement, that she belongs there. That she is, in the right clothes and the right setting, indistinguishable from the people she has always served.
And then the invitation ends. She goes home. And the woman who comes back is not the same woman who left.
The Post-Office Girl is Stefan Zweig's most powerful and most unexpected novel - a ferocious indictment of class inequality, a precise account of what poverty actually costs, and a dark, propulsive story of two damaged people who have run out of reasons to be careful. Written in the 1930s during Zweig's exile from Nazi-occupied Austria, left unfinished at his death in 1942, and discovered among his papers forty years later, it is the book that revealed an entirely unsuspected dimension of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.
By Stefan Zweig. Author of Chess Story, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Beware of Pity.
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