The Post Office Girl was left unpublished at Zwieg’s death, and it’s perhaps easy to see why; it’s not the masterful miniature that one is familiar with from Zweig’s other novellas.
It’s a rather heavy-handed critique of capitalism and of class, things that for sure require criticism but need a somewhat more subtle treatment than this. Christine is a lowly Post Office worker in a provincial Austrian town, who suddenly receives an invitation to stay at a luxury hotel with her aunt.
At first, Christine is enthralled by this world of glamour, wealth and apparent gentility, but quickly finds that she is not of sufficient breeding to be treated as an equal by its denizens. It is this that turns her against the rich, rather than their inherent evils. Ultimately her reaction is class-jealousy rather than anything else. One can be against a class without wanting to belong to it, and I think that’s a more powerful story. But maybe Christine’s story is more realistic than I would prefer to admit.
The novella is split into two distinct sections, and the continuity between them is not that great. In the second part, Christine and her lover decide to rob the Post Office. Christine is convinced by a combination of desperation, sexual obsession and her newly minted envy of the rich. In fact, the two parts could stand on their own to the advantage of both; as it stands, the linkage between them is so clumsy that it diminishes both parts.
Like all of Zweig’s prose, there are wonderful pieces of writing and characterisation in The Post Office Girl, but I feel that his other other books, for example the brilliant Beware of Pity, are a better place to turn for someone starting out with his work.
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