Categories: books
Date: 13 October 2009 09:00:11
The Post Office Girl was first written in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jewish writer as Rausch der Verwandlung (which means something like "the intoxication of change"). The novel was not published in the German-speaking world until 1982, long after the author's suicide in Brazil in 1942. The manuscript was found amongst his effects and there was some uncertainty as to whether it was an unfinished novel.
It was translated into English in 2008. I first heard about it in the local paper which wrote a feature as Zweig had lived in the Ancient Roman City for a year or so having left Austria when WW2 broke out.
The story tells of the life of Christine, a clerk in a post office, who has spent her 28 years of life struggling to make ends meet in the madness of the inflation-hit years in Austria after the end of WW1. Her mother is ill and requires medication they can ill afford.
Christine's future looks hum-drum and bleak until the day she receives a letter from her aunt who has married a rich American. They are on holiday in Switzerland and invite Christine to join them. From her impoverished background, she is suddenly catapulted into a life of frivolity, fashion and fun and she throws herself into it with gusto - daring to believe that she deserves a bit of light-heartedness after the grind of the previous decade. But equally suddenly, her access to this sparkling lifestyle is denied and she has to return to her former life.
After some time, she meets a man who has also drawn a short straw in life and together they hatch a plan.
Is the novel unfinished? It's hard to tell. Zweig would have had little idea of how real life was going to turn out when he first started writing this novel, so it is perhaps appropriate that the story finishes when it does. Whether this was planned or not, we may never know.