Confusion

In Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, a venerable privy councilor approaching the end of his career adds a “secret page” to the public record of his accomplishments, confessing the true story of his youthful initiation into the delights and perils of intense scholarship. After a first semester in Berlin more devoted to amorous adventures with local shop girls than books, he makes a fresh start in a small university town in central Germany where a professor’s brilliant lecturing style sparks a new all-consuming passion for learning and reading. He takes lodgings above the apartment of the professor and his wife and is soon a regular visitor there, dining with them on a daily basis and successfully inspiring the older man to make a fresh attempt to complete his magnum opus. And yet the professor’s enthusiasm for his devoted protégé alternates with cold scorn and sudden dismissals, leaving the perplexed student crippled by feelings of inadequacy and rejection, feelings only the professor’s frustrated young wife seems to understand. But the secret anguish behind the older man’s apparently irrational cruelty will not so easily out. . .

Laying bare the fraught relationship between human instincts and higher callings, physical longing and the desire for knowledge, muddled emotions and the quest for intellectual clarity, Zweig’s intoxicating novella probes the mysteries of the creative process and the limits of sublimation.

“Confusion is one of his finest and most exemplary works . . . a marvelously poised account of misunderstood motives, thwarted love, and sublimated desires . . . a perfect reminder of, or introduction to, Zweig’s economy and subtlety as a writer.” –Robert Macfarlane, The Times Literary Supplement

"Passion and dedication . . . Outside the works of Plato, I don't think I have ever read a better or more honest account of what ill always remain at the heart of teaching" –Gabriel Josipovici, The Jewish Chronicle

“A brilliant writer.” –The New York Times