Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig (Author), Stefan Zweig (Author), Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt (translators) (Author)

Synopsis

Reprinted with a new cover in B format for the fourth time due to popular demand, Beware Of Pity is a powerful novel which explores the complex hidden recesses of emotion. In 1913, a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible dangers of pity and eventually flees from them into the battlefield. His involvement begins with a faux pas: he had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance. Paying her an occasional afternoon call seemed to give him a new sense of purpose and he did not notice how imperceptibly bound up with tenderness his concern might be. The girl's face brightened, her father doted, the young man's self-esteem rose. But he was gradually to learn that pity, like morphia, is only a first solace to the invalid and unless one knows the exact dosage, and when to stop, it can become a virulent poison. Beware of Pity is Stefan Zweig's only novel and is a devastatingly sober realisation of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, set against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 365
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 01 Apr 2009

ISBN 10: 1906548153
ISBN 13: 9781906548155

Media Reviews
Beware of Pity is the most exciting book I have ever read...a feverish, fascinating novel. Anthony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph
Author Bio
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.