Review: Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

Burning Secret [1911/2008] – ★★★★1/2

“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Stefan Zweig knew that authentic drama, horror, trauma may simply reside in one’s realisation of personal circumstances, situation, predicament. The story in this psychologically astute novella takes place in Semmering, Austria. When one dashing dandy, a baron, stops at a resort all alone, he is ready for his next romantic conquest partly to ward off the boredom in this place. He is young, but already an expert womaniser, and his gaze falls on one beautiful woman who also happens to be with her twelve year-old boy. The Baron’s pursuit of the woman starts through befriending that boy called Edgar, but the Baron does not even realise the dangers behind sowing so many seeds of attachment, as Saint-Exupéry also wrote in The Little Prince: “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed“.

Many of Zweig novels concern themselves with selfishness and narcissism, and their relations to love. What happens when one bestows fake love (or mindlessly grants moments of happiness as in Zweig’s The Post Office Girl) or plays with others’ emotions for some advantage? Who is hurt, then, and what are the consequences of hopes being built on a thin ice? That theme is most prevalent in such Zweig novels as Beware of Pity and Letter From an Unknown Woman, but it continues in some form in Burning Secret, too. On the one hand, we have the Baron: “He was, like everyone of a strongly erotic disposition, twice as good, twice as much himself when he knew that women liked him….He knew that, if he was to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box”. And, on the other hand, we have one intelligent and sensitive boy Edgar, who still clings to his mother and shyly explores this world of perceived elegance, kindness, and goodness.

The story starts with the Baron before the author surreptitiously shifts the perspective to Edgar, as he makes friends with the Baron, and then tries to understand his mother and the Baron’s confusing, increasingly mysterious interactions. Their behaviour hides the key to unlocking that “burning secret” for the boy. Zweig was a master of exploring interesting psychological situations that often concern deeply emotional, at times introverted, people, and in this story, he also opens up the innocent world of sensitive Edgar that is about to be turned upside down. Poor Edgar is oblivious that “love” can also be a game where it is very hard to differentiate the prey from the hunter, and the pursued from the pursuer, especially since these roles can reverse in a fraction of a second.

But Zweig does not just lay out the situation, he wants us to feel and actively participate in this tale. We become all-knowing observers and also that lost boy from whom his mother and his new friend start to slip away: “He didn’t understand anything at all about life, not now he knew that the words which he’d thought had reality behind them were just bright bubbles, swelling with air and then bursting, leaving nothing behind.” The readers and that intelligent boy know that behind every seemingly mundane action, there is meaning, and that is what unites them, and behind every other line by Zweig there is seemingly a real emotion bursting to come forward. George Orwell once said that the best books tell you what you know already, and this cannot be truer than in relation to this novella where the protagonist slowly grasps “the fact that the truth could simply be trodden underfoot, extinguished like a burning match”. Edgar starts building his fortifications, gearing for his attack on the world that betrayed him: “you learn a lot when you hate, and you learn it fast”.

However, the beginning promises more depth and complexity than Zweig’s rather simple ending ultimately delivers. If we start with something like an engrossing story with moments of thrills and plenty of insight, then the conclusion slightly underwhelms, but not before hitting that final nail on the coffin of the main protagonist’s rosy worldview. And, what also elevates this novella is that Zweig also happens to be one of those few authors who never beat around the bush and do not need five hundred pages to strike at the very core of human essence and showcase critically the human condition. Burning Secret may be a very slim novella, but it weighs a ton in emotions. Zweig knew instinctively that in the matters of a heart, it is best to go straight to the heart of a matter.

Burning Secret is a delicate exposé of childhood awakening to the deceptions and cruelties of the adult world full of artifices. In a few very short chapters, the whole world is built and then destroyed, and, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, all one can do is to stare blankly.