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December 15, 2002
REVIEWS: Knowing the unknown
Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer who migrated to Brazil in protest against the occupation of his country by Hitler, committed suicide with his wife in 1944. About two decades before his death, he wrote Der Brief Einer Unbekennten (The letter from an unknown woman). It was a time when the novella had gained popularity in Germany as a literary genre because of its brevity. The novella emphasizes only one aspect of a human life and has a tragic end.
The path of love, to use a hackneyed phrase, is bumpy, more so for a woman. This is the theme of Stefan Zweig’s novella, The letter from an unknown woman. He describes the torment of a woman smitten with love, and captures her feelings and emotions with a psychoanalyst’s skill and precision. He brings out graphically a cardinal difference between the two sexes in their perception of love which is not the same for a man as for a woman. To Byron “love is for man a thing apart, but it is woman’s whole existence”.
The unknown woman in her early teens, falls for her neighbour — a famous author and novelist almost twice her age. He becomes a focus of her universe. Even the thought of loving anybody else becomes a crime for her. For three years, so she tells her lover, “my every hour was yours. I kissed the door handle you had touched; I picked up a cigarette end you had thrown away, and it was sacred to me because your lips had pressed it.”
His liaisons with other women do not revolt her nor dampen her ardour. She spurns offers of marriage from other men so that she remains free and available for him if and when she receives a call from her lover.
His attitude towards her is of total indifference and apathy. He forgets her completely and disdains her overt overtures. Despite enjoying intimacies with her and siring her only child, he does not recognize much less own her. She keeps greeting him with white roses, once a year, on his birthday. He does not even care to probe who sends him this bouquet. In a chance encounter in a concert, after ten years he picks her up and keeps her with him for the night without recognizing her though she throws hints about their past meetings.
He treats her as “a prostitute picked up at a dancing hall” slips a few bucks into her muff while she is leaving. He does not ask her name, nor where she lives. To him she is “a casual adventure, a nameless woman, an ardent hour which leaves no trace when it is over”.
The denouement comes when her son dies. It devastates her. Left alone in the world, she feels robbed of her love. Low and listless she dies lamenting the lack of response from her lover to whom she had devoted her entire being.
The reader may find the story a bit unreal. But, unlike a novel, a romance need not remain an ordinary experience within the realm of the possible.
The unknown woman’s lover, like Zweig, is a novelist and an author. He receives her letter on his forty-first birthday. Zweig wrote the story in 1922 when he was 41. This may be more than a coincidence. The story could be autobiographical.
The letter from an unknown woman was first published eighty years ago. It was an instant hit. Written originally in German, it has been translated into over two dozen languages all over the world. Khursheed Kamal Aziz, a historian of renown, has done well in digging it out from obscurity. Few, if any, among the students of modern literature know about Zweig or his works. Aziz’s effort may well revive interest in the writer who was acclaimed by his contemporaries, as the “the prolific author of novellas and biographies”. A brief biographical note about Zweig adds to the value of the book. On the downside, the book is padded out with copious quotations.
The unknown woman
By Khursheed Kamal Aziz
Vanguard Books
45 The Mall, Lahore
Tel: 042-7243783
Email:
vbl@brain.net.pk
ISBN 969-402-364-4
252pp. Rs495
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