Beware of pity - Stefan Zweig

Wes Anderson on Stefan Zweig: "I had never heard of Zweig...when
I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity. I loved this
first book. I also read
the The Post-Office Girl. The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that were sort of stolen
from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to
represent Zweig himself - our "Author" character, played by Tom Wilkinson,
and the theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law.
But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph Fiennes,
is modelled significantly on Zweig as well."

"Stefan Zweig was a dark and unorthodox artist; it's good to have him back."--Salman
Rushdie

The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful
heart, and Beware of Pity,
the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers
the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings.

Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian
cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the
home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks.
The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller
asks his host's lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left
her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity
and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot
to restore the unhappy invalid to health.