Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig
A bit of synchronicity and chance today. About half way through Zweig’s excellent Beware of Pity, I decided to take a break and watch The Cake Eaters, primarily because Kristen Stewart is in it. Almost right from the start, I could see her role echoed Zweig’s story in some important ways. Stefan Zweig’s novel centers on a young woman who is paralyzed, and befriended by a young lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army. Befriended, at first, because of his sense of pity, duty, honor, guilt. Because he had asked her to dance at a lavish party, not knowing she was too crippled to. She goes into hysterics and he flees from the house in shame. But comes back out of guilt. The book travels through the Hungarian countryside as well as the country of the mind, our phobias, our fears, our strange sense of debt and the psychology of pity.
In The Cake Eaters, Stewart plays Georgia, a young girl suffering from Friedreich’s ataxia, a degenerative disease that afflicts the nervous system, impacts speech and coördination, and has no cure. Stewart is befriended by Beagle (Aaron Stanford), a young man who works at her school in the cafeteria. There are some issues regarding class here, but the gap is much, much smaller than it is in Zweig’s novel. In Beware of Pity, the financial distance between Edith and Anton is immense, though we learn that her father didn’t come from money, but schemed for it on a grand scale.
The movie, however, presents quite a different rationale for the main characters seeking each other out. Pity doesn’t seem to be a factor. Like Edith, Kristen Stewart’s character is on a mission. And though she has a great deal of difficulty getting around, and some trouble even talking, she knows what she wants. Knowing she doesn’t have a lot of time to live, or to live with even a modicum of control of her body, she is determined to find out what sex is like, and Beagle is in the right place at the right time.
In the novel, at least at the halfway point, there is no sexual tension between Edith and Anton. He likes her cousin, Llona, more. Times have changed, of course. The movie is set nearly a century after the main action of the novel, and class differences between the two exist in obvious form. There is no financial aristocracy in The Cake Eaters. It’s small town, upstate New York. But the physical debilitation of both female leads evens much of the playing field. Tragedy can strike anyone, anywhere.
Interesting note about the movie: It’s directed (first time) by Mary Stuart Masterson (Benny and Joon). She does a good job with, I’m guessing, some Indy-film obstacles. The story seems bigger than the presentation. Sometimes, a “small movie” works and seems to fit the frame. The story coincides with its form. In this case, I think it needed more time, more development of the characters, especially the relationship between Georgia and her mother, Violet (Talia Balsam). Her eccentricities, her photography of her daughter, could have used some further explication. The subplot with Beagle’s brother, Guy (Jayce Bartok, the screenwriter), also could have been developed more. All in all, a good film. Not great. But good. And Kristen Stewart continues to grow. There is something inexpressible about what lies behind her eyes. Depths to be explored. Wisdom to be revealed. She seems obviously on her way to genuine, deserved stardom.
After a number of months of reading the German, I have recently completed Stefan Zweig’s earlier novel — actually a series of four novella — titled Amok. “Amok” or “amuck”, as in our phrase “running amuck”, denotes an uncontrollably violent and frenzied episode that is identified as occuring specifically in Malaysian culture. The term and the concept come, in any event, from this culture. Now, when describing an episode of public violence, a shooting spree by a crazed individual, for example, German newspapers will invariably refer to the individual as “der Amoklaufer” (with an umlaut over the “a”) or “the person who ran amuck”.
So here from a text that I believe appeared around 1920 Zweig provides his own kind of psychological study on extremely obsessive, and therefore extremely self-destructive, patterns of behavior. I call it “patterns of behavior” because the actions and the narrative is strangely static in every story; and Zweig seems to want to relate the various experiences under the rubric of the signal concept that he titles simply “Amok”. The most compelling of the stories concerns what happens to a young girl who lives across the hall in an apartment building from a famous writer. All of the stories have their moments, but I would tentatively conjecture (after reading through the text only once and in a foreign language) that Zweig’s psychological writing leaves a little something to be desired. The question necessarily remains very much open to interpretation, however, and to further engagement with his writings.
Interesting. Thanks for the comments, Robert. I think Zweig does show great insight in The Post-Office Girl. Excellent novel. Have not read the book you discuss, so can’t comment. But I do think he’s worth further exploration.
Thank you, coming full circle to the novel you discussed some months ago at this site, and so I look forward to it as well as other interesting matters from time to time.
Being under the weather slowed down the reading quite a bit. Want to do a review of Petersburg soon as well. Received a publisher’s copy recently. New translation. So I’ll probably write about that after Zweig. So many books, not enough time …