Stefan Zweig, Journey into the Past, 1976

Zweig and his wife both committed suicide in Brazil in 1942, probably in despair at what was happening in Europe as Zweig was a lifelong pacifist. Being his long-lost final novella this was first published in Germany in 1976; he certainly took his time writing it, beginning in 1924 and probably finishing sometime in the 1930s. It concerns the reunion of two lovers whose early illicit relationship was interrupted by the First World War, their exploration of whether memories of their relationship actually match the reality, and their questioning of if they can pick up where they left off. The reader will, inevitably, notice a specific and fundamental detail that is missing, but this absence actually gives an indication of how Zweig was a cut above the rest and a re-read for more subtext is worthwhile. This is a microcosmic story of one man’s heart; on one level it could be easily dismissed as a minor love story but there’s far more going on here than is visible on the surface. This is something brief, but masterly.  PY

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Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams, 1993

Einstein’s Dreams is a useful work to see how odd scientific notions can be embedded in the everyday. Lightman tries to get into the head of Einstein, as the latter entertains a series of ideas about time while tying in some detail of 1930s Europe around him: here, time is either running backwards, in circles, slower, faster, ad infinitum... and peoples lives are altered accordingly. This book’s construction is fairly simple, but the rather repetitive nature of the writing means it could have included any number of observations which make for a highly impressionistic composition. Nevertheless, it’s good to know that noted physicists such as Lightman can write – and think – like this.  PY

•  Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. It was runner up for the 1994 PEN New England / Boston Globe Winship Award, and was also a selection for NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” Book Club. The novel is one of the mostly widely used texts in American colleges today.

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Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim, 1939, 1975

The fictional Austrian town of Badenheim’s new ‘Sanitation Department’ wants the town’s Jewish residents to register, promising a better life for them in Poland, while these same people are more concerned with blaming each other for the failure of that year’s summer arts festival. I started Badenheim, 1939 thinking that it was straightforward fiction, but by the halfway mark some characters were behaving in such an unlikely manner towards each other that I finally figured the story must be allegorical. The way the characters are obsessed with irrelevant details of their lives and infighting while something big and nasty is hinted at in the background is good, but the two threads are never really juxtaposed and the reader has to make all the inferences. This is tell-not-show writing for a story that really needed more clarity as to its intentions as well as its slightly unrealistic nature.  PY

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