Clarissa by Stefan Zweig (review)

Although this work is the fragment of a novel, left incomplete in Zweig’s papers at the time of his death, Clarissa is yet another major work that can be added to the author’s great oeuvre. Reminiscent of The Post Office Girl (Der Rausch der Verwandlung), Clarissa is yet another “coming of age” story that takes place just before the onset of World War I. However, Clarissa is less complete than The Post Office Girl. This becomes evident in the latter half of the novel, which appears to be more rushed and less cohesive than the first half. But this should not deter the reader; in fact, the rushed pace only adds to its mysterious personality, “a kind of Austrian novel” (156), as Zweig referred to it just a few weeks before his suicide. The original German of this novel, according to its translator William Ruleman, was rife with ellipses and contained incomplete sentences. Ruleman admits that there were many places that had to be filled in or embellished, in order for the novel to make sense to the reader. He has thus removed ellipses and awkward syntactical structures, “mainly with the reader’s comfort in mind” (165). In fact, the novel is thus very readable, despite its being unfinished.

At the time of writing, Zweig was in exile in Brazil, having left language, country, and culture behind. Indeed, the work demonstrates the author’s determination to relate the world through the eyes of a young woman, a world that is turned on its head and rapidly changed with the sweeping destruction of the Great War. With the untimely death of her mother, the protagonist Clarissa is left by her military father at a cloister school, where she is educated and raised by nuns. She has very little contact with her father and her brother, who eventually follows in his father’s military footsteps. When her education is complete, Clarissa leaves the convent school and becomes an assistant to Dr. Silberstein, a Jewish neurologist. He becomes something of a father figure to her and opens her eyes up to the new possibilities in life that she had never had the opportunity to experience. Dr. Silberstein sends Clarissa out to Switzerland to a symposium in his place, due to her levelheadedness and organizational skills. It is in Switzerland that Clarissa meets her first love, the professor Leonard, who is involved in an unhappy marriage. Their prewar relationship gives Clarissa her first sense of being a truly happy young woman in love with a man with whom she has much in common. But World War I lurks on the horizon, and the work steadily involves itself in more political tones. “Our democracy has grown too broad. Socialism is already just a system of mechanisms and organizations instead of a true community,” Leonard relates to her (55). The quiet and reasonable Clarissa thus begins to see the world through a new lens: the approaching war will not only shatter her quiet existence; it will also bring her to another relationship later in the novel, a relationship that will be as unstable as the world surrounding her and will leave her living a lie as well as drive her to an uncertain future.

It is, in fact, the ending to this novel that leaves the reader in the lurch: there is no conclusion. Zweig has left it open, as if to emphasize his own exasperation with the world that will spiral ever so quickly to the next world war and his utter frustration with the notion of Fatherland. As Leonard exclaims, “We have to free ourselves from this crazy notion of Fatherlands! To Hell with Fatherlands!” (59). The inconclusiveness of the novel lends the reader no information as to the fate of Clarissa; her remaining life is only referred to as the “dead years” (155).

In conclusion, this work is yet another excellent example of Zweig’s masterful storytelling about the “little people” who fall victim to the larger problems of the world. Clarissa herself endures, as...