Stefan Zweig had—according to Will Stone's introduction—a lot of love for travelling by train. He also abhorred mass tourism and authoritarianism, which is actually reflected in at least one of his musings on travels and places in this anthology, where Zweig's travels around Europe are collated.

At every moment nuns and monks pass furtively, greeting each other in subdued tones, dark, silent, hurrying, funereal at first sight like harbingers of death. But as they draw closer, watching over the long lines of children in their care, and you discover beneath the white caps or in the shadow of wide brims, calm gentle faces, then you realise that only the constant reminder of grandeur and death could be behind so immutable a gravity and could have etched such a coarse picture of life in these features.

Zweig used a visceral and old-schooly language which was not really typical for his days; this is an author who was closely in contact with his emotions and also made writing look like the easiest thing in the world.

So, even if the writing looks opaque to begin with, it's not.

Rarely had I felt with such intensity that hackneyed wisdom contained in the alphabet, according to which death must be signally mournful while life is an interminable force that compels even the most recalcitrant to love.

Altogether, for me, this anthology—ruminations on places that Zweig visited—isn't one of my fave Zweig adventures or even anthologies, but still, it's lofty, airy, and written in a very chilled-out way. ( )

In Journeys, Will Stone has translated some more Stefan Zweig for edification and enjoyment. This is my first reading of Zweig’s travelogues, and in some ways, they are surprising.

What is remarkable is how much they are out of date. The towns, like Avignon or Bruges, have not changed. If anything, huge effort has gone in to preserving and restoring anything that smacks of old. Avignon is still very much the city of popes, and Bruges the city of canals. But where Zweig describes a dour, sour and morbid atmosphere in the early 1900s, these locales have reinvented themselves into high living towns of fairs, plays, spectacles and tourism. Where the only thing Zweig finds inspiring in Bruges is a small collection of paintings in a room at St. John’s Hospital, and in Avignon some fountains celebrating historical figures, the towns today fill guidebooks with things to do, see and be a part of. His own hometown of Salzburg gets the same cursory treatment.

The other thing that stands out is the absence of humanity. In Zweig’s biographical works, it’s all people all the time. In these tours of cities, almost no one is named or quoted. There is reference to history and impressions of environment, but the city stories are surprisingly lacking in roundness. He is just passing through.

This is all the more puzzling because Zweig’s passion was travel. He loved nothing better than exploring new towns and writing about them. Yet aside from the historical value of seeing them a hundred years ago, these stories are nowhere as fulfilling as his people stories.

In other words, there are more sides to Stefan Zweig than a simple reading a book or two would proffer.

David Wineberg ( )