Barnaby Sandwich is a Viennese Jew—that is, by sympathy. He likes to read his newspaper in the cafe. He likes whipped cream in his coffee. He likes to believe in truth, humanity, and the ultimate triumph of reason. But everything he knows about this schematic type of the Viennese Jew he learned from Elias Canetti and Joseph Roth—two great writers who were, to be sure, Jewish, and who did write in German, and who both, each in his own way, had something to do with the Habsburg Empire or its passing, but neither of whom, strictly speaking, was Viennese. So it was with great delight that Barnaby recently discovered Stefan Zweig, who was born, in 1881, actually in Vienna. (Zweig went to London in 1934, and then to New York, and then to Brazil, where he and his wife died in an apparent suicide in 1942.)

The first thing Barnaby read was the novella called Chess Story or The Royal Game, in which Dr. B., imprisoned alone for months, manages to steal a chess book during an interrogation and teaches himself to play, with himself as his only opponent. To Barnaby’s understanding, this is a book about the impossible situation of the sensitive person, or of civilization generally. Confronted with the world’s mindless and inexorable cruelty, we have two choices: we can surrender, and be crushed; or we can fight—but only with the world’s methods, which will themselves drive us insane. The only option, therefore, is simply to withdraw. To put it another way, sensitive anger at an insensitive evil can only go backwards, hurting the one who is angry, leaving the evil untouched. (Barnaby thinks that engagement with reality is highly overrated—he has a small private income, and he never wears a belt.)

The very next thing that Barnaby did—after a detour to the toilet and a short walk to buy a coconut bun—was to buy Fantastic Night & Other Stories, in which he read “Letter From an Unknown Woman.” In this long story, or novella, the unknown woman writes to a man whom she has known, and loved, since childhood; to whom she lost her virginity; to whom she bore a child; with whom she spent other nights; whom she encountered across Vienna over years; to whom she sent, every year on his birthday, white roses—but who never on any of these occasions recognized or remembered her. Every time she was new, and insignificant; every time he was unaware of her tremendous love, unaware of his significance to her. Only on her deathbed does she write to him to tell him all this—because however much unhappiness his failure to recognize her caused, she does not want to trouble him. In this story Barnaby—with his wine-besotted and mystical mind—found an almost perfect allegory. Is the woman God? or wealth and privilege? or society? or the very world itself, tremendously complex and full of meaning, deeper and more real than our minds can ever know? And the man—is he love, grace, beauty, success, art, happiness, peace? Self-delusion? They can be any of these, and more, almost everything—but not actually everything; their meaning is just sufficiently limited that it remains meaning. And meanwhile it remains simply an excellent story, regardless of its meaning, which is the way that Barnaby prefers to read. “Let the bowels of my mind worry about the bowels of the story,” he says, “while the surface makes love to the surface.”

Also meanwhile, last night, at the White Horse Tavern, another dowdy English major pointed out to Barnaby his resemblance to Dylan Thomas, and then, after another drink, explained that she meant a “late” Dylan Thomas. Barnaby resolved to get a haircut and do some sit-ups at the first opportunity.

(Chess Story is available in a nice edition from NYRB Classics, translated by Joel Rotenberg, and Fantastic Night & Other Stories from Pushkin Press, various translators. "Letter From an Unknown Woman" is translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. The personal information about Zweig is lifted directly from the author bio in the front of Fantastic Night. Dylan Thomas was Welsh.)