Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
|
It turns out that if you're willing to splurge a bit (or have a good Kobo coupon), there's an even better version to get:
The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig by the late Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell, also out from Steerforth's Pushkin Press imprint.
This contains 20+ of his stories, including the ones in LFAUW&OS, and amortizes to a much better price point even at $8.87 CAD from Amazon, or $10.09 CAD from Kobo, where it's couponable (I was wondering what I was going to use that SAV50 code on).
In this magnificent collection of Stefan Zweig's short stories the very best and worst of human nature are captured with sharp observation, understanding and vivid empathy. Ranging from love and death to faith restored and hope regained, these stories present a master at work, at the top of his form. Perfectly paced and brimming with passion, these twenty-two tales from a master storyteller of the Twentieth Century are translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell.
Bargain @ $1.99 (couponable @ Kobo) also from Steerforth's Zoland Books imprint:
The Conformist by the late Alberto Moravia (
Wikipedia), an old-school Italian literature figure. This vintage 1951 anti-fascist literary novel was the basis of the eponymous 1970 film (
Wikipedia) by major Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci (
Wikipedia, you may know him best from
The Last Emperor, of which there is an excellent Criterion Collection edition), and which won a lot of film festival awards back in the day. This is another one I think I'll be picking up.
Secrecy and Silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers.
Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years. But then he is assigned to kill his former professor, now in exile, to demonstrate his loyalty to the Fascist state, and falls in love with a strange, compelling woman; his life is torn open - and with it the corrupt heart of Fascism.
Moravia equates the rise of Italian Fascism with the psychological needs of his protagonist for whom conformity becomes an obsession in a life that has included parental neglect, an oddly self-conscious desire to engage in cruel acts, and a type of male beauty which, to Clerici's great distress, other men find attractive.