Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig
My Rating: 5/5
I got this book as a gift from a friend returning from Vienna (Austria), I rather forced him to get me one. Now all my friends know that the moment they ask me what to get from the country they are returning, it will never be something from Duty Free, but from the airport book stall, but the only condition is that it has to be a local author book and in English. I neither offer them a writer's name nor a book, so it always comes as a surprise. This was a totally surprise read with so much human psychology in play that it shocked, surprised and kept me engaged to the very last page with such an intriguing story, yet it took me close to two weeks to finish, but no complaints. The story is very straightforward and told from the perspective of a highly decorated army officer who had personally shot down three fighter aircraft in the Second World War and had kept an enemy army at bay with his histrionics of machine guns and all that. How his little act of pity lands him in a soup is the story all about when he mistakenly asks a crippled girl to dance with him just because he was invited to a high-end party, where, in the first place, he was in awe of one of her close friends. What leads is an amazing story where we, the readers, feel his pain and angst as he goes through and how it all technically gets forced on him with no way out for him. At times, I myself was confused as to who was rooting for? the crippled girl falling for the officer, or her father blackmailing him with his power or our hero’s pure heart making him do something his brain tells him all the way not to do. But what shocked and broke my heart was the ending, hats off to Stefan Zweig for that ending that I simply couldn’t predict, yet he leaves me with a few questions, which are food for my thoughts on the gem of a story. The title is so apt that mid-way ways I just couldn’t think of a better alternate option.
Have you read Beware of Pity or any other Stefan Zweig book? I am looking forward to a few more from him as they are much more acclaimed than this one. Also, my next foreign gift book is going to be from Shakespeare, guess where my friend is coming back from?
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