The weight of time on love

Here is a new novel of the great Stefan Zweig, translated for the first time in French. --Attention I will reveal several plot elements, and may spoil the discovery of the new if you are thinking of lire--

This new recounts the reunion between a man and a woman once linked by an impossible love and separated by World War I and the Atlantic Ocean. Much of the new recounts the memories of the man: his social rise, along with the birth of this love that ignore long before being brutally separated by a promotion that will send in Latin America. The separation anxiety will declare this love. The war ZIP impose silence and unbridgeable distance between them. Until the reunion ...

It is a pleasure to find intact the talent that Zweig is unparalleled to describe the torment of souls in a very controlled manner, very precise yet poetic. It is not a masterpiece that could outperform Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman, Letter from an Unknown, The chess player, or the confusion of feelings, but it is not a new minor wasted or sloppy either. It its place in the work of the author. The two points of attention are located primarily on the analysis of the desire to revive an old passion, that time and distance have yet seriously begun, desire which is more like an attempt to relive the past as build a new relationship that can never be the same as there are nine.

Note: Patrice Leconte shot of this new intelligent and beautiful adaptation in 2014 under the title A promise, alas unedited video yet.