Narrative · A way to begin
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau
Stefan Zweig · 1927
Opening lines
In der kleinen Pension an der Riviera, wo ich damals, zehn Jahre vor dem Kriege, wohnte, war eine heftige Diskussion an unserem Tische ausgebrochen, die unvermutet zu rabiater Auseinandersetzung, ja sogar zu Gehässigkeit und Beleidigung auszuarten drohte.
In the little boarding house on the Riviera where I was then living, ten years before the war, a heated discussion had broken out at our table which unexpectedly threatened to degenerate into a furious quarrel, even into spite and insult.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from projekt-gutenberg.org
Synopsis
In a small guesthouse on the Riviera, near Monte Carlo, a guest's wife runs off with a young man she met the day before, and the affair divides the residents. An elderly Scottish lady, Mrs C., then chooses the narrator to confide in him the day that, twenty-five years earlier, overturned her life: a widow for two years, she was captivated, at the casino, by the feverish hands of a young gambler.
Context
The author wrote this story under the impression of a stay on the French Riviera, and took the idea from an epistolary novel by the Princess of Salm, published in 1824 under a similar title. He published it in 1927 in a collection of three stories, between two other tales of passion. An old lady tells a stranger about the day that counted in her life; the device, a framed narrative and a confession made to a stranger, recurs in other texts by its author.
Who it is for
About a hundred pages, easy and quick to read, often the first Zweig one reads. Psychological analysis takes precedence over action.
Prizes and reception
Adapted four times for the cinema, from 1931 to 2002, and once for American television, with Ingrid Bergman, in 1961.
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