Twenty Four Hours in the Life of a Woman by Stefan Zweig - Mesmerizing book

 Twenty Four Hours in the Life of a Woman by Stefan Zweig

Mesmerizing book

This is an exceptional work.

One could say a chef d’oeuvre…

However, writing a note about it presents a challenge…

-          How to write about the most impressive aspects without resorting to the plot?

-          One way out is of course to include a spoiler alert, and that may have to be inserted

There is a strange thread in some of the last books that I have read.

-          Suicide is at the center of the plot, or a very important issue-it makes sense after all

In The Heart of the Matter, by the august Graham Greene, the only way out of an impossible conundrum is taking one’s life…in fact, two personages kill themselves.

Then, in the Pulitzer Prize Winner The Executioner’s Song by the acclaimed Norman Mailer, we have again an attempted double suicide.

-          There’s one way out of the confusion- I am not revealing much from the current book

-          Instead, there are some clues to what happens in others

-          An eventual reader of this note would be interested in Twenty Four Hours and not in The Song

The book starts with some events that take place at a hotel by the sea, where various characters appear to move to the center stage.

There is a married woman, who is on vacation with her husband and daughter- or does she have two?

That notwithstanding, I was expecting the story of the philandering woman and her lover to develop and that we would follow her.

-          But we don’t

-          Instead, we focus on two other guests

An older woman is intrigued by the acceptance with which one of the visitors meets the runaway wife.

But that encourages her to start confessing her own Twenty Four Hours in her life.

The events took place decades ago, after the death of the woman’s husband that had caused a depression.

The older lady felt helpless and unnecessary after her spouse had died, with her grown children not needing her anymore.

-          Indeed, nobody seemed to care for her

She went to a casino, where she did something remarkable, starting to study the hands of people and not their faces.

She claims that we can say much more- everything actually- by looking at the hands that are so different from one another

-          Imagine that! I find it surprising

Then there is a young man.

The association with this guy has ups and downs.

Very high points and an extremely low crater.

As mentioned at the start, I have trouble in saying what had a considerable impact in the story- and that is what happens.

I would make a reference in my native tongue.

Fat chance that you know this tongue...

A proverb goes something like this:

-          Pe cine nu lasi sa moara, nu te lasa sa traiesti

It does not really give away the clue to the entire tale and if anybody is really interested, they can find the translation…even if google can sometimes hide the meaning and not give it, with its crazy rendering.

A local sage said that proverbs are sort of stupid, so even that saying is not really shedding any light on the Twenty Four Hours.

Included on the Le Monde list of best one hundred novels of the last century, I found the novel mesmerizing.