Stefan Zweig's recently re-discovered novella Journey into the Past begins at Frankfurt railway station where two people meet to board the train to Heidelberg.
"And while the rattling wheels invisible below them rolled onward, into a future that each of them imagined differently, the thoughts of both returned in reverie to the past."
The First World War has separated Ludwig from his unnamed lover, and they have been apart for nine years during which much has happened in each life. But now they meet again. Does anything other than the ghost of a feeling remain after all this time, and if so, is a future together a possible or a plausible one? Can the past support even the present?
This is a slight book, but an intense one, subtle and highly charged. There is little more to the plot than I have already outlined, but it's a deceptively simple essay on nostalgia, obsession, and on whether a fragile love can be an enduring one; as such its profundity demands a second reading.
This book was my introduction to Zweig so I can't comment on the broader scheme of things other than to say that my reading of it seems to place it in line with the rest of the canon (see this article on Zweig by Clive James, and another, comprehensive piece by Julie Kavanagh).
