THE POST-OFFICE GIRL
By Stefan Zweig
NYRB Classics, 257 pages, $14

Christine Hoflehner, beautiful and carefree before the First World War, loses her brother, is impoverished by the collapse of her father’s business and is condemned, finally, to endless monotony as a postal clerk in a forgotten little town, earning only enough to keep herself and her ailing, widowed mother. “One village post office in Austria is much like another,” begins The Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig’s 1930s novel, which has just been published for the first time in English, in a beautiful translation by Joel Rotenberg.

Christine is so thoroughly broken to her lot that she can imagine nothing else; an invitation to a Swiss resort, from a distant aunt, only frightens and upsets her. But once at the resort, dressed in her aunt’s hand-me-down clothes, she learns that she’s still young, that she’s beautiful, that she’s alive. And then, just as suddenly, she’s returned to her poverty—but it’s a poverty, now, that she can recognize.  read more »