Amok

Description

On a sweltering ocean-liner travelling from India to Europe a passenger tells his story: the tale of a doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his duty and the pull of his emotions; a tale of power and desire, pride and shame and a headlong flight into folly. This is one the most intense and incisive of the novellas which brought Stefan Zweig to worldwide fame.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas includingLetter from an Unknown Woman,AmokandFear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York-a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel,Beware of Pityand his memoir,The World of Yesterday.He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

'I can't think of a writer who is more successful at depicting amour fou - what one critic describes as "sex and madness breaking through the lacquered screen of upper-bourgeois society"- nowhere more grippingly than in Amok in which a doctor, a Conradesque loner, is tipped into "a sort of human rabies" by an unattainable colonial wife.' - Julie Kavanagh, Economist Intelligent Life 'To read Zweig is to be in the presence of a properly mature writer, for all that his characters are often in the grip of highly inappropriate desires. (...) These are unforgettable stories, beautifully translated. Anthea Bell is a first-rate translator; she brings out the humour as well as the anguish that make Zweig's work so sympathetically acute.' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian