‘Burning Secret’ by Stefan Zweig     (1913) – 124 pages                Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

The Pushkin Press has reprinted a huge selection of fiction by Stefan Zweig including this novella, ‘Burning Secret’. The reprinting of so much of Zweig’s fiction is quite unusual for a writer who has been gone from us for over eighty years. After reading ‘Burning Secret’, I can fully understand why the publisher has taken such a huge interest in this writer. Stefan Zweig will be one of my “go to” writers in the years to come.

In ‘Burning Secret’, the Baron is staying in Semmering, a skiing resort in Austria, on holiday. The Baron is a young man “who will never overlook any erotic opportunity, whose first glance probes every woman’s sensuality and explores it”. The Baron is a ladies man, a seducer. There is a woman, Mathilde, staying at his hotel with her 12 year-old son Edgar. Her husband is not around, and the Baron is attracted by her and sets his designs on her.

The Baron uses the strategem of befriending the boy in order to reach the boy’s mother. This ruse works perfectly. However, when the boy Edgar senses that the Baron and the boy’s mother are paying more attentions to each other than to him, he gets angry and begins to interfere with their plans to see each other behind his back.

Edgar tells his mother that the Baron is a bad man.

“He’s a liar; he’s only pretending. He does it out of mean horrid calculation. He wants to get to know you, that’s why he was nice to me and promised me a dog.”

Edgar does not yet know what the Baron wants from his mother. That is the burning secret.

Meanwhile Edgar’s mother tells Edgar to stay out of her and the Baron’s way.

“Children don’t understand these things. You have no business meddling in them. You must behave better, and that’s all there is to it.”

The author tells this story of a boy starting to figure out what it is all about between adults, men and women, in a clear and vivid fashion. It was a real pleasure to read this novella. Since his fiction deals with elemental situations between people, the writing of Stefan Zweig will last.

Grade:    A