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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Fear by Stefan Zweig

 I posting early because tomorrow I'm leaving for Florida.  It might take me a day to answer comments, but I will do my best.

Well, you can listen to it also, but this is what I was listening to when I wrote this review:  the Best Blues.

For the month of July I've been sending patriotic post cards.  Here are a few:

Fear by Stefan Zweig

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Fascinating psychological tale about a woman who has everything: wealth, good family, security, whatever she wants. She's not bored, but neither does she care about anything. She calmly drifts through her life. She has children. They are there, but they hold little interest for her. She lets the governess and her husband tend to them.

She's perfectly self-satisfied, self-absorbed and completely non reflective. Her whole life is taken for granted.

There's another man in her life. She doesn't love him, but she enjoys the attention, the time together. The fact that she's cheating on her husband doesn't come into consideration. She simply doesn't think about anything that does not provide personal gratification.

Then one day, she is leaving her lover's apartment when she is confronted by a hag of a woman who accuses her of sleeping with her boyfriend. The hag screeches and screams and demands money to remain quiet about it.

The woman is terrified and gives her all the money she has on her. The hag says it's not enough. She wants more. The woman promises more and rushes away.

This is turning point of a placid, selfish existence into one of horror. The woman cannot sleep or eat. Somehow the hag has found where she lives. No matter how much money she gives the women, it is never enough. The hag is an albatross. She can't escape her, nor can't stand up to her-she's not used to fighting battles.

The woman becomes haggard as time goes on, she thinks of ending her life. Telling her husband is unthinkable. She'd rather die.

This story was a torment to get through, because, even though I did not like the lady, she was so helpless before the merciless hag.

I will not spoil the story, except to say, it ends in an unexpected way.



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Hope everyone is safe and have a wonderful 4th of July.




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Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

Here is Max Bruch's Symphony no. 2

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This moving story reaches humanity on a number of levels.

Spoiler: I'm not giving away the ending but I do describe the essence of the story.

A man from Austria is on a ship to South America. On the ship is a young Russian man who is a Grand Chess Master and is on his way to play a tournament with another master.

Zweig spends the first chapter or so focusing on this young Russian. An ignorant peasant boy, orphaned at an early age is raised by the village priest. While watching the priest and another man play chess, he shows his own aptitude for the game. He soon rises among the ranks until he is a world champion.

What is interesting about the Russian is how Zweig makes him out to be little more than a savant. He has no interest in any other intellectual pursuit, reading, math, philosophy etc...he apparently is as concrete as a cinder block. His only talent is chess, which seems to be a natural ability. His only strange defect in the field is that he has to see the players on the board. He cannot imagine games in his head.

This one talent makes the youth insufferably arrogant. Like many stupid people, he treats everyone else with contempt, but is careful to engage only people on his intelligence level, knowing that if someone were to try to speak on any subject out of his league, he'd be at a loss. And since chess is the only thing he knows, any other topic of discussion would be beyond him.

At this point I have to wonder. Other than an idiot savant, is it really possible to be intelligent at only one thing? I would think that the mental skills required of chess strategy would transfer over into other areas.

Yet I do know some people like this. And I have found it a mistake to think that because someone is brilliant at, say, math, that they are interested or capable of delving into art, music or philosophy. Of course it could also be argued that someone like, say, me who is a professional musician is even slightly adept at math. I am very much a right-brained musician.

But for most of us, or at least a lot of us, we don't hold to any delusions of grandeur. We enjoy what we know, we accept what we don't and we are not so ignorant as to look down on others, or, as a couple of odious people I know, think that putting down other people would disguise a mediocre mind.

But that is a major digression. I merely wanted to relate what thoughts the first part of the novel provoked.

The story then takes a turn as the Austrian narrator relates how he and a group of men on the ship came to challenge the Russian Chess Master. It looked very bleak for them, made worse by the fact that the Russian was so insolent about beating them.

Then, out of the blue, another man who was watching the game started telling them where to go. I should mention the Russian would play and then walk across the room so the men could discuss among themselves their next move.

That game ended in a draw. Later the Austrian looked up the man who had helped them win. He was also from Austria. In his cabin he told his story.

He had been held by the Nazis to divulge information. This he refused to do. Their form of torture was to keep him in a room by himself without any stimulation. His only contact with others was during interrogations. He found this maddening, but one day while waiting to be interrogated, he came across a book on chess.

The man goes on to describe how he committed all the games to memory and when he became bored with that, he began playing games in his mind against himself. This eventually led to a form of madness. In fact he told our narrator that he feared if he played another game of chess, he would succumb to permanent insanity.

I'll stop there, but I must say what I value most about this story was the character sketches of both men. Both suffered from a type of mono-mania, but for different reasons and their outcome was dramatically different as well.

There's so many things to analyze in this story. The Russian man was free but limited by his mental narrowness. The Austrian man was brilliant and his imprisonment stretched his mind to even greater heights, but at the cost of his own sanity.

This story will stay with me for a long time.



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