Hail the master of the bitter end

Stefan Zweig's Amok and Other Stories confirms him as one of the masters of the short story, says Nicholas Lezard
Amok by Stefan Zweig
Buy Amok at the Guardian bookshop

Amok and Other Stories

by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell

(Pushkin Press, £7.99)

I try to be indifferent to publishers, concentrating more on the words between the covers than the words at the bottom of the spine, but, really, is there a more wonderful publisher than Pushkin? They pay people to translate works of European literature that would otherwise have only the smallest imaginable audience in this country. The books themselves are both gorgeous and practical. I even like the paper they use. And £7.99 isn't going to break the bank.

But even if Pushkin charged double the price and printed their books on loo-roll they would still have to be praised to the skies because they seem to be on a mission to publish everything written by Stefan Zweig.

It is a pity that Zweig's name isn't better known here these days. He was once hugely, internationally popular: in exile from Nazi Austria in England, he ruefully conceded that he was one of only 10 German-language authors who could actually afford to be in his situation (not that he found this much of a consolation in the end). He is one of the masters of the short story and novella, and by "one of the masters" I mean that he's up there with Maupassant, Chekhov, James, Poe, or indeed anyone you care to name.

The first story in this collection, though, recalls Conrad more than anyone else: it employs a device Zweig was fond of, the story-within-a-story; this, its ship-board setting and its narrative of a man driven crazy by the heat recall Heart of Darkness: "Sooner or later we all succumb to our weaknesses, some drink, others smoke opium, others again act like brutes - some kind of folly comes over us all." And, as with Conrad, what fascinates him is the internal state of a person who has been exposed to an extreme event.

The four stories here all end - I apologise for giving away the endings, but it's unavoidable - with an act of suicide. Actually, there are quite a few of Zweig's stories which contain suicides; you could almost imagine that suicide was his preferred formal method of narrative resolution. His own life ended by his own hand, as he contemplated the fall of Singapore and what in 1942 looked like the inevitable triumph of the Third Reich. But suicide isn't, by any means, all that these works are about: in fact, now that I've let that particular cat out of the bag, you can concentrate more on what leads his characters to their ends.

What propels the catastrophes of two of the tales here ("Amok" and "The Star Above the Forest") is sexual or romantic longing, and when you read Zweig you are struck by the debilitating prudishness that afflicted almost all English writers until ... well, I am tempted to say Martin Amis.

To read Zweig is to be in the presence of a properly mature writer, for all that his characters are often in the grip of highly inappropriate desires. (Well, they wouldn't be such fascinating stories if that weren't the case.) The third story here is almost about sex: a thick-witted servant becomes insanely devoted to her titled master, with disastrous results; its uneasy traverse across the class divide makes for another subject-matter that most English authors of the time found too alarming to contemplate. The final story, "Incident on Lake Geneva", is a short parable about the human cost of war; first published in 1936, but set in 1918, it is, with exquisite brevity, a meditation on the extinction of human values that Zweig could see around him. "There's no way anyone can help anyone else these days," says a character.

These are unforgettable stories, beautifully translated: I can't compare them with the original, but there's no sense of any nuance being lost. Anthea Bell is a first-rate translator; she brings out the humour as well as the anguish that make Zweig's work so sympathetically acute; and she even appends a helpful afterword.