"Post Office Girl" by Stefan Zweig *****

• #2 Summer Sub Club read with Beth 2012
• Austrian author
• Originally published in 1982
• Quotes I Like:
• p.15..."But still: a little bit of security, a roof over your head, room to breathe, just barely; might as well get used to it---after all, the casket's an even tighter fit."
• p.19..."She tries harder, this twenty-eight -year-old woman, to remember what it is to be happy, and with alarm she realizes that she no longer knows, that it's like a foreign language she learned in childhood but has now forgotten, remembering only that she knew it once."
• p.22..."Without meaning to she grows silent."...the result of the onset of WWI and the changes it wrought in her family's life
• p.28..."For this quiet, unprepossessing , passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidized flat, books are like flowers.  He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicolored rows; he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands."
• p.32..."She tries to think, but the monotonous stuttering of the wheels breaks the flow of her thoughts,  and the narcotic cowl of sleep tightens over her throbbing forehead--that muffled and yet overpowering railroad-sleep in which one lies rapt and benumbed as though in a shuddering black coal sack made of metal."
• p.34..."This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel's disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel."
• p.66..."In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite."
• p.139..."There's an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear.  Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points.  The elements of the spirit behave the same way.  Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can't be felt.Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different.  Once the vessel is full, the world can't add to it."
• p.175..."But 'must' is a hard nut to crack, and it doesn't always fall from the tree no matter how hard you shake it."
• Vocabulary:
• General Notes:
• Brilliant juxtaposition of pivotal moments.....the drab, routine of the post office with the arrival of the telegram, the joy of girlhood with the arrival of WWI 
• I was so touched by the maps which Franz Fuchsthaler made for Christine, unfolding "accordion-like"
• p.36..."Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.  This first blow marks the end of Christine's un-selfconsciousness."....so true
• p.122..."...in her presence he sees that one generation's painfully acquired mistrust of life is fortunately neither understood nor credited by the next, and that each new wave of youth is a new beginning."...how true, maybe even evolutionarily (is that a word?) adaptive 
• p.216..."The vast power of money, mighty when you have it and even mightier when you don't, with its divine gift of freedom and the demonic fury it unleashes on those forced to do without it...". 
• Summary on back of my edition says that this novel "lays bare the private life of capitalism"
• the notion of the marital suicide pact....raised between Christine and Ferdinand....foreshadowing in Zweig's own life
• Review:   As I read this novel by Stefan Zweig, the image of a roller coaster ride surfaced in my mind repeatedly.  You know the way the car climbs slowly to the summit of each curve then shoots down the slope at high speed, then repeats the pattern again and again?  This novel follows that pattern.  Zweig's writing is brilliant!  He juxtaposes long descriptive, contemplative passages with mind-boggling pivotal moments in the lives of the characters.  The small roller coaster is the string of post WWI experiences of the protagonist, Christine, and eventually with Ferdinand as well.  The meta-roller coaster is the sense of loss, lack of meaning, and search for meaning experienced by all who were touched by the war.  Zweig's use of language, his characters, and his plot make this a memorable read!