A beautiful meditation on the power of reading.
In June 1905, at the age of 23, Stefan Zweig left Paris for Algiers, departing from Genoa via Naples and Tunis. Twenty-six years later, he recalled an episode that made him realize, having published only a few short stories and translations, “the power of books to open vast horizons to our souls and organize our personal lives.” It is this “spiritual revelation” that he describes in Éloge du livre, published in a German-language Hungarian newspaper in 1931. On the Italian steamer crossing the Mediterranean, Zweig befriends a young cabin boy, Giovanni, barely older than himself. During a stop in Naples, Giovanni asks him to read a letter received from his fiancée. Zweig is shocked, suddenly understanding that his companion is illiterate. And he suddenly realizes what isolation, “walled within himself,” is experienced by someone who has never read a book, a “poor eunuch of the mind.”
This beautiful meditation on the powers of reading, this “indestructible force”, is one of Zweig’s most beautiful texts—and one of the least known. It is followed in this edition by about ten other texts on literature and writers, including some previously unpublished in book form: his preface to Andreas Latzko’s Le dernier homme (1920), portraits of Franz Hellens (1923) or Sigmund Freud (1926 and 1936), a tribute to Bernard Grasset as a writer (1930), a preface to La Chaise électrique, a novel by Chalom Asch (1931)…
