Dangerous Pity

One evening, at a dinner party in the Austro-Hungarian provinces, a young cavalry officer named Anton Hofmiller makes a simple social error: he asks a young woman to dance, not having noticed that she cannot walk. In the terrible moment that follows, his guilt is genuine. So, in its way, is everything he does afterward - the visits, the attention, the friendship he offers to Edith Kekesfalva, who lives in a paralysis that is physical and, because of it, social, cut off from almost everything a young woman might want from life.

The problem is that Edith mistakes his guilt for love. And Anton, who cannot bear to cause further pain, does not correct her.

Stefan Zweig's only full-length novel - written in exile, completed in 1939, as the civilization he had spent his life celebrating was being dismantled around him - is one of the most searching psychological studies of the twentieth century. It opens with an epigraph that states its argument plainly: there are two kinds of pity, and only one of them is compassion. The other is impatience - the urgent desire to be relieved of the sight of suffering, dressed in the clothes of kindness and just as dangerous as cruelty, perhaps more so, because its victims believe it to be something else.

Hofmiller is not a bad man. He is something more unsettling: a decent man whose decency is finally about himself. Zweig traces the consequences of that distinction with remorseless precision, through a narrative that is both a page-turning tragedy and a moral examination from which no comfortable exit is available.

Devastating, exact, and impossible to forget.