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Books

Stefan Zweig: the tragedy of a great bad writer

A review of The Impossible Exile by George Prochnik. Contemporaries sniped at his success, but for a Jewish novelist in Austria in the 1930s, the possibilities of remaining a comic figure were few

22 November 2014

9:00 AM

22 November 2014

9:00 AM

The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World George Prochnik

Grants, pp.300, £19.99, ISBN: 9781590516126

Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of the intellectuals of the German speaking world during the decades before 1940, in which Zweig gathered a colossal and adoring public both in German and in multiple translations. It was like a password among the sophisticated.

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