Confusion : The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. von D.

Rating:
Summary: The complex relationship between student and teacher
Review: A friend who teaches European lit asked me if I didn't think Stefan Zweig was "sentimental." But in the case of "Confusion," all the high emotion fits the story of a rather obsessive-compulsive young man, who is rather disinterested in learning until he meets the right teacher. Framed by the perspective of this same young man as a 60-year-old professor, the tale is even more poignant. This tale of an over-eager student, who can't see that he's behaving like a spurned lover when his teacher criticizes him, is a searing psychological study. Considering that Zweig gave the eulogy at Freud's funeral, who better to explore such things? I've never read a work by Zweig I didn't find richly textured, beautifully written, and deeply felt. If that's "sentimental," then I plead guilty!

Rating:
Summary: The complex relationship between student and teacher
Review: A friend who teaches European lit asked me if I didn't think Stefan Zweig was "sentimental." But in the case of "Confusion," all the high emotion fits the story of a rather obsessive-compulsive young man, who is rather disinterested in learning until he meets the right teacher. Framed by the perspective of this same young man as a 60-year-old professor, the tale is even more poignant. This tale of an over-eager student, who can't see that he's behaving like a spurned lover when his teacher criticizes him, is a searing psychological study. Considering that Zweig gave the eulogy at Freud's funeral, who better to explore such things? I've never read a work by Zweig I didn't find richly textured, beautifully written, and deeply felt. If that's "sentimental," then I plead guilty!

Rating:
Summary: Zweig should be rediscovered
Review: I knew of Zweig as Richard Strauss' librettist. Wanting to see what his work was like when he stood on his own I discovered his novella, "Confusion". Elegantly and tautly written it is the story of a respected professor reflecting back upon his life and about the man who had the greatest impact on his life. This man is his English professor. As a young student, our narrator is drawn to this brooding man and his mysterious wife. He is drawn into the web of their lives and the terrible secret that is hidden there.

Rating:
Summary: Zweig should be rediscovered
Review: I knew of Zweig as Richard Strauss' librettist. Wanting to see what his work was like when he stood on his own I discovered his novella, "Confusion". Elegantly and tautly written it is the story of a respected professor reflecting back upon his life and about the man who had the greatest impact on his life. This man is his English professor. As a young student, our narrator is drawn to this brooding man and his mysterious wife. He is drawn into the web of their lives and the terrible secret that is hidden there.

Rating:
Summary: Rediscover the long-neglected Zweig
Review: It's nearly impossible to review "Confusion" without giving away the "hideous secret" on which the plot turns, so I'll limit myself to saying that, by today's standards (outside conservative America, at least), the scenario Zweig offers here verges on implausible. Today, the Professor's "vice" would be well known, of little consequence, and hardly likely to generate much confusion - least of all in Roland, an intelligent and highly-sexed nineteen year-old. So why bother reading this? For twenty-first century readers, I suppose, it's that shift in values which is now part of the point of reading Zweig, and a large part of the pleasure: we can see just how far we've come. Zweig's popularity declined soon after his death in 1942 and his sentimental humanism, based on the values of late nineteenth-century Viennese liberalism, has made him an easy target for some. Yet his vivid, psychoanalytically-oriented biographies, novellas and stories are still incredibly engaging. Something like the fictional equivalent of Freud's collected works, they usually deal with the psychological representation of repressed personalities suffering major crises under the weight of nineteenth-century values, and in that sense they are wonderfully evocative of the time. But not only that: his focus is always the emotions - agonizing frustrations, secret fears, explosive joys - with insightful analysis of all of them; and his characters are closely observed - entire plots can turn on one look, one word, one obsessively worried-over instant. It's a rich and rewarding oeuvre, not least because of Zweig's finely cadenced voice (translated here with considerable skill by Anthea Bell). "Confusion" is also worth reading for the Professor's unusual theory of Elizabethan drama, its historical motivations, and its arguable place at the pinnacle of English theatre. It's also interesting because it confirms something we all know from experience: that the events which determine the course of our lives are not always the ones others might think.