The Post Office Girl was not published, perhaps not finished, during his lifetime. Evidently he wrote most of it in the Thirties, took the manuscript with him when he fled Nazism to Brazil, and was perhaps still working on it there before he killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1942. Forty years later it was published in German, and now, thirty years after that, in English. There is nothing dated about it. It strikes no self-conscious poses; the language is straightforward, precise, delicate, and powerful. The flow of the story, now lingering, now fast and lively, is under perfect control. A postmodern reader expecting linear exposition and descriptive passages to lead to “old-fashioned” resolution is in for a shock. Perhaps because the book is a work in progress, perhaps because Zweig’s conception of it was essentially ambiguous, there is no “closure” at all. The moral desolation of the novel is unsparing, accurate, and absolute. It is far beyond cynicism. It is as irrational and unanswerable as Dostoyevsky. The story begins in a dreary Austrian village, where Christine, whose bourgeois family fell into poverty during the war, barely supports her sick mother by her soulless job in the post office. Suddenly, a telegram from the aunt who went to America before the war — and Christine is transported to the magical world of a luxury hotel in the Alps, where wishes she never knew she had are granted before she makes them. This long section of the book is marvelously written, bright as mountain air, vivid with delight. But the delight begins to be excessive, verges on hysteria. And so the reversal comes — again, wonderfully told, unforgettably real. Back down into the ashes, Cinderella.
