Confusion by Stefan Zweig

Listening to Chopin's Complete Works.

                     Brooklyn Bridge by Emil Holzhauer

 While in Florida I visited an old friend whom I had not seen in many years.  We knew each other in Florida but lost touch when she moved to Spokane, Washington and I moved to New Jersey.

She recently moved back to Florida so I spent an afternoon with her last week while my parents were at a doctor's appointment.

My friend and her family are some of the most interesting people I know personally.  Debbie has a sister who is a Hollywood actress, their daughter is a sculptor in Boston and most interesting of all, Debbie's husband, Ed, a journalist and writer, has a famous uncle.

Ed's uncle is Emil Holzhauer, one of the Ashcan Artists.  Holzhauer was a student of Robert Henri. Debbie and Ed live in Holzhauer's house on a bayou near my parents' home.

Here are some photos of Holzhauer's work in their house:

The precious lady in the hall is Ed's older sister.  She suffers from dementia and is the sweetest person you could meet.  Hercule (of course I brought him, he's so clingy) liked her a lot.  He politely refused the Teddy Bear she offered him, however.

I asked Ed if he'd Beta-read a mystery I wrote.  As I was sending it to him, one of my birds hit the screen and sent the attachment off to the Cloud Grave yard in the sky.  So I sent him a ghost story I wrote.  Of course now I'm pins and needles hoping he likes it.

For some reason, I didn't take a photo of Debbie and Ed.  Oh well.  Next time.

The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig: Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, Journey into the Past by Stefan Zweig

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This particular review is only of the story Confusion. I have reviewed the previous stories separately.

Confusion is about a young man who becomes the student to a professor at the university he attends. The professor's expertise lies in Shakespeare's works. The student becomes obsessed with this professor and his work. Finally he rents a room in the same house the professor and his wife are living.

Things are strange. The wife is emotionally distant and sardonic. The professor is in turns, kind and gentle and caustic and cold. This puts the young man in turmoil. He doesn't know why the older man is treating him like this.

Also the professor takes to disappearing for a few days, telling no one of his whereabouts.

Furthering the mystery, his fellow students and the other professors have become cold toward the student and begun to exclude him from their circles.

Nothing is solved until the end, and I won't give it away, just to say, that I find so many things unrealistic and wrong about it.



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