As I wrote two days ago, I thought about reading Zweig right after I finished The Sense of an Ending and at that time I pulled Burning Secret off the shelf, but eventually decided to wait – a little afraid, if I'm honest, that reading Zweig might push the nostalgic melancholic feeling a little too close to despair. Having now finished Burning Secret, I can't decide if my fear was warranted.
Reading Zweig, as with many of his contemporaries who were similarly displaced and killed by the rise of Nazism, I sometimes find it hard to read the story without constantly remembering the fate of the author. A tragedy hangs around the work, even when – as in the case of Burning Secret, originally published in 1913 – that tragedy lies far in the future. The woman and her son who are at the center of this story are well-to-do Austrian Jews. (How many Jews lived in Vienna in 1913, I find myself wondering while I'm reading. Roughly 175,000 apparently, and just 4,000 in 1946.)
Zweig is a masterful storyteller. At the outset, Burning Secret promises the story of a holiday affair. A young man sets out to seduce a married woman who is staying with her son in at the same hotel in the Austrian Alps. The seducer attempts to befriend the mother through the son, and this leads to a unexpected turn in the story, wherein in becomes the child's story, rather than that of the adults. Twelve-year-old Edgar is on the precipice of understanding the adult world and its secrets. He longs to be admitted into it, but is faced with the recognition of how shielded he has been as a child. By the end he wants only a resumption of his childhood simplicity. It was a wonderful little book to end the year with.
