meghan rose allen

It seems kind of redundant for me to have written The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig. Who else would they have been by? I think I need to write a story called The Collected Novellas of a name that isn’t mine by my name. Also, it won’t be collection of novellas. It’ll be a poetry book or a piece of investigative journalism or a video game. It will be full of sentences like The red house is blue and Feed the dog food to the cat.

Moving on to novellas of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig, wikipedia tells me that “[a]t the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world.” I could see why. With only a few broad strokes, the world he paints has such vivacity, the ostentatiousness of middle-Europe before and between the wars. The first class carriages and lamp lit streets and fur coats on ladies and thin little cigarettes. Silk stockings with lines up the backs. Men with mustaches, unironically.

And then, because don’t I always have my and then‘s, there’s a sort of monotony in excess. The stories are dense for very little actual goings-on and they start to drag. Plus all the women in the stories are silly, bobble-headed fools. They actually aren’t differentiated in any way, so I’ll rephrase: the woman in four of these novellas is a silly, bobble-headed fool. Her adultery, since the woman never remains faithful, is clearly on her, never on the man with whom she partakes her dalliances, or even the husband who (in story number three), and this is a big spoiler here, hires an actress to torment his wife to the point of suicide. Yes, the husband concocts a plan that destroys his wife’s mental state, but she’s the one who needs her head examined; he’s presented as quite the clever fellow for his machinations.

My book’s blurb laments how Zweig has fallen out of fashion. Yes, well, there may be a reason for that when an author treats fifty percent of the populace as flibberty-gibbets.

Moving on again from those four novellas of Zweig’s, The Collected Novellas has one more story in it: A Chess Story. Our maligned adulteress is not present; actually I don’t think any women are, which raises a whole other set of issues, but pushing that aside, why couldn’t the four other novellas be like this one? We’re on a ship, men are strolling about having metaphorical cock-fights with each other, and then it jolts into a whole, completely paranoid, Old Boy-esque backstory of a man trapped in a hotel room, losing his mind, and megalomaniac chess masters, and the whole thing races even though it’s a chess match where one of the players is purposefully going slow and it’s like all the things one dreams of in a novella, speed and plot and emotion and gravitas, but then we’re done and A Chess Story is only the second story in this collection, and there are three more to go, and if it weren’t for the brilliance of A Chess Story I’d just toss the book at the wall (not really, it’s on my kobo) and forget about it.

So I liked The Chess Story. The rest can stay behind in obscurity. For my tastes of Germany between the wars, I’ll take Christopher Isherwood, any day, instead.

The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig went on sale February 2, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

(On Netgalley, when one posts a review, there’s always a Are you interested in connecting with this author checkbox. I only check yes for authors who are deceased because I really want to see Netgalley try to make that sort of thing happen. So maybe we’ll get a Stefan Zweig seance sometime in the future courtesy of Netgalley.)

A slice in the life of. That’s what this book is. A slice in the life of Alice. Or maybe Gideon, since the told-in-the-first-person sections are his. Over the space of a few months we see, well, what exactly do we see? That’s hard to say. For a book that has evolution in the title, not a whole lot of stuff happens. Not that having not a lot happening is a bad thing. But this novel has a very calm, flat feel to it. It’s a deep pond, with lots happening underneath, but we never really see the depths. Robinson barely even hints at the depths. A novel primarily of character, there has to be depths in the characters shown, at least in one. Instead, we have sketches or prototypes of the people we see again and again in literary novels: the struggling single mother, the friend secretly in love with her, etc. At least the kids are kids. They aren’t wunderkinds. They watch Dora and play with Barbies. I appreciated that.

Parched. That’s it. That’s the word I’m looking for to describe this book. A dry, dusty, parching of the plot, of the characters. I almost think that A De-evolution of Alice would be a better title, for how what is in the book fades away. I felt it fading. I felt the pain. If books existed in a vacuum, I likely would have appreciated (enjoyed is the wrong word because how can you enjoy a book about disintegration) The Evolution of Alice more if I hadn’t read, immediately before starting this book, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. All my emotion was already gutted out of me, scooped out like with a spoon, before I began The Evolution of Alice. The Evolution of Alice is more emotionally manageable than A Little Life, but maybe not as meaningful. I don’t think that’s the right word. I’m all wrong with words today.

The Evolution of Alice was okay. Okay and nothing more.

The Evolution of Alice by David Alexander Robinson went on sale August 6, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.