Fear

by Stefan Zweig

More out of novelistic fantasy than romantic passion, Irene Wagner, a well-to-do upper-class woman leading a seemingly perfect and boring life, becomes involved in an extramarital affair that drags her into a stormy web of blackmail, secrets and paranoia for the terror of being discovered and losing everything she now discovers she loves and needs so much. Stefan Zweig explores the abysses of the human heart through guilt and fear in a masterful psychological tale with a surprising ending.

71 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 10, 2024

About the author

Stefan Zweig was one of the world's most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America, and Europe. He produced novels, plays, biographies, and journalist pieces. Among his most famous works are Beware of Pity, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. He and his second wife committed suicide in 1942.
Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany before settling in Salzburg in 1913. In 1934, driven into exile by the Nazis, he emigrated to England and then, in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York. Finding only growing loneliness and disillusionment in their new surroundings, he and his second wife committed suicide.
Zweig's interest in psychology and the teachings of Sigmund Freud led to his most characteristic work, the subtle portrayal of character. Zweig's essays include studies of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Drei Meister, 1920; Three Masters) and of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche (Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, 1925; Master Builders). He achieved popularity with Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; The Tide of Fortune), five historical portraits in miniature. He wrote full-scale, intuitive rather than objective, biographies of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935), and others. His stories include those in Verwirrung der Gefühle (1925; Conflicts). He also wrote a psychological novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1938; Beware of Pity), and translated works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Emile Verhaeren.
Most recently, his works provided the inspiration for 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Reviews

[Olga Malafeka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Agony on every single page.

[Thewalkingelene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bro this was toxic as fuck, like from both sides.
But I'd fuck the husband

[Kristine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fear is my second Zweig short story. I have to appreciate the way he writes. So many emotions and so much intensity on every page. He did a great job in exploring fear that suffocates you and his writing style makes you feel everything in detail. I thought that the beginning where Irene is fed up with her ordinary "great" life was very interesting and a good hook. He doesn't rush us, as a writer Zweig is patient. I am torn about the ethics of what husband did too. I thought he took it too far. He just could have confronted wife but I guess he wanted for her to confess. Still unnecessary. In the end I'm glad I read it.

[LightIssues · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads remarkably classist for a long time, until the horrifying end reveal which it turns out we're not meant to read as that horrifying after all lol. Zweig has a way with sentences, but they rarely accumulate to a whole that actually manages to give off the strong feelings they're meant to drown the reader in, and for all his preoccupation with the shards of the bourgeois life, he strikes me as an incredibly bourgeois writer himself, or so conservative he cannot help but stand for that class and its normativities.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This symphonically emotional novella from 1910 is one of those that you read and first think, "Why haven't I read this before?", quickly followed by, "why isn't this taught in highschool?" The blackmail plot here delivers some thrilling menace that powers the book across its pages and our protagonist along the streets of Vienna, but it's the swooping and soaring of Irene's inner landscape that is the star here. Really good.

[mambasis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. The way the suspense builds through the pressure inside her mind, allowing us to experience the panic and fear authentically, is simply brilliant.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

everyone may look away while i log all my novellas