The post-office girl - 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."

The post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in
a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon,
as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed
to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that
Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train
ride, Christine finds herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege
that she had never imagined.

But Christine's aunt drops her as abruptly as she picked
her up, and soon the young woman is back at the provincial post office, consumed
with disappointment and bitterness. Then she meets Ferdinand, a wounded but eloquent
war veteran who is able to give voice to the disaffection of his generation. Christine's
and Ferdinand's lives spiral downward, before Ferdinand comes up with a plan which
will be either their salvation or their doom.

Never before published in English,
this extraordinary book is an unexpected and haunting foray into noir fiction by
one of the masters of the psychological novel.